Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what target has been set for time taken to process applications from UK citizens waiting to return to the UK with surrogate children from outside the EU; and how many such applications made in the last three years were processed within that time.

Entry Clearance applications are divided into settlement and non-settlement categories. The ‘settlement’ category includes applications to bring an adopted non-EU child to the UK. The service standard for processing ‘settlement’ applications is: 95 per cent within 12 weeks of the application date and 100 per cent within 24 weeks of the application date, however, there may be circumstances in complex cases where a decision will take longer.
The Home Office does not record whether the adopted child was a surrogate birth or not on the entry clearance case-working system in a way that can be used to produce statistic