Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an estimate of the average waiting time for asylum decisions; and what steps her Department is taking to reduce the average time.

The average time taken to process a substantive decision is not currently available from published data, and could only be collated and verified for the purposes of answering this question at disproportionate cost.

However, the Home Office does publish data on the number of asylum claims awaiting an initial decision by duration. This data can be found at table Asy_D03 of the ‘Asylum and resettlement summary tables’.

Additionally, data on the percentage of applications processed within 6 months is published in table ASY_01 of the ‘Immigration and Protection’ data of the Migration Transparency Data collection.

We are restoring order to the asylum system so that every part – border security, case processing, appeals and returns – operate swiftly.

As a result, asylum decision making increased by 52% in the last three months of 2024.

The Home Office continues to take action to speed up asylum processing whilst maintaining the integrity of the system.