Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to resolve delays to processing of (a) visa applications for highly skilled workers and (b) visa sponsor licences.

Performance and efficiency of visa and sponsor licence processing is continually reviewed to ensure performance is as strong as possible.

Information on our immigration routes with service standards and whether they have been processed against these standards is available as part of our transparency data, at: Migration transparency data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

We are, however, currently flexing resources across all routes to ensure a robust response to the Ukrainian crisis while still processing standard applications and sponsor licences within service standard wherever possible. As a result, customers with standard applications in study, work, and family routes may experience some temporary impacts to the processing of their application.