Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, for what reasons her Department decided that further submissions on asylum and human rights cases must be made in person in Liverpool; with which bodies her Department consulted before making that decision; and what assistance her Department will provide to help individuals travel to Liverpool to make such submissions.

The changes are designed to speed up decision-making on further submissions, enabling us to grant protection more quickly to those who need it and remove those who have no right to be here.

Centralising the process will allow us to make decisions within five working days in most cases. The new process applies only to failed asylum seekers whose claims have already been refused, and their appeal rights exhausted.

There have been extensive internal discussions with policy experts, legal advisers and operational staff during the development of this policy. We believe that early public consultation would have led to a rush of further
submissions, but we notified the National Asylum Stakeholder Forum in advance of the changes. There is already a nationwide requirement for those who claimed asylum before March 2007 to lodge further submissions in Liverpool.

Travel costs will not be reimbursed. In exceptional cases where a person is genuinely unable to travel to Liverpool, for example due to a disability or severe illness, there is provision to accept further submissions by post.