Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the current average waiting time is for a decision to be made on a non-straightforward asylum application.

Until recently, our aim was to decide 98% of straight forward asylum claims within six months of the date of claim. However, many asylum claims are not straight-forward, which meant it was not always possible to make an initial decision within six months of the date of claim. Many of these cases had a barrier that needed to be overcome to make the asylum decision and many of these barriers were outside of the Home Office’s control.

To promote a greater understanding and transparency of the asylum system, we have prioritised deciding older claims and those made by more vulnerable individuals, whose claims are more complex. This has resulted in a reduction in the proportion of claims decided within 6 months.

We are engaging stakeholders as part of our plans to introduce new service standards which will help inform how we will prioritise asylum decision making in the future. This will seek to address the concerns that have been raised with the current arrangements, additionally as part of our wider strategy, we aim to increase the overall number of caseworkers to reduce the total number of outstanding claims.

The Home Office does not publish data relating to the average waiting times for decisions to be made on straight forward and non-straight forward asylum claims, but does publish data on the percentage of asylum applications processed within the current service standard to decide 98% of straight forward asylum claims within 6 months of the date of claim.

Data on performance against the current published service standard can be found on tabs Asy_10 and Asy_11 of the Asylum Transparency Data November 2018 at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/asylum-transparency-data-november-2018

In the November release of the transparency data, the Home Office are still reporting performance against our previous service standard to decide all straight forward asylum cases within 6 months of the date of claim. The next release of transparency data, scheduled for 28 February 2019, will still contain data on performance and will be labelled under the title of percentage of cases decided within 6 months rather than explicitly referring to the service standard.