Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what external agencies are carrying out character enquiries on behalf of UK Visas and Immigration as part of the application process for British Citizenship; and what the (a) mean, (b) median and (c) longest time taken to complete such enquiries by each such agency was in the last year for which information is available.

No external agencies currently carry out specific character enquiries on behalf of UK Visas and Immigration as part of the application process. UK Visas and Immigration routinely completes robust checks itself to inform its assessment
of character, accessing information collated by other Government departments and agencies for their own purposes. No information is aggregated in national reporting systems to enable reporting on the time taken for these checks to be
returned.