Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to increase the speed of processing asylum claims.

To speed up the asylum process for legacy claims, those made before 28 June 2022, around 12,000 asylum seekers from high-grant nationalities within the legacy WIP are being asked to provide information in a new Home Office questionnaire to help determine their case.

The intention of these questionnaires is to enable claimants to provide any further information about their claims after their initial screening interview upon arrival.

All asylum claimants are subject to mandatory security checks to confirm their identity and to link it to their biometric details for the purpose of immigration, security and criminality checks. These checks are critical to the delivery of a safe and secure immigration system.

We are driving further productivity improvements by simplifying and modernising our system. This includes: shorter, more focused interviews, making guidance simpler and more accessible; dealing with cases more swiftly where they can be certified as clearly unfounded; and recruiting extra decision makers.

We have already doubled our decision makers over the last 2 years, and we are continuing to recruit more. This will take our expected number of decision makers to 1,800 by summer and 2,500 by September 2023.