Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the (a) average and (b) longest waiting times were for processing applications for certificates of sponsorship for skilled workers in each month from November 2023 to April 2024.

The Home Office does not routinely publish data on these matters; however, we have recently deployed an IT change which introduces a new compulsory field for required mandatory information which enables defined certificate of sponsorship applications to move more expediently through the system.