Asylum: Applications

(asked on 18th August 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the average timescale for her Department to make a decision on an asylum application in 2021 to date.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 10th September 2021

The Home Office is unable to state what proportion, offer timescales currently or provide average timescales to make an decisions on asylum application in 2019 and 2021 as this information is not published.

However, the Home Office does publish data on the number asylum applications awaiting an initial decision by duration, for main applicants only. This data can be found at Asy_04 of the published Immigration Statistics:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statistics-year-ending-march-2021/list-of-tables.

The Home Office are pursuing a programme of transformation and business improvement initiatives that will speed up decision making, reduce the time people spend in the system and reduce the numbers who are awaiting an interview or decision. This includes almost doubling decision makers number to c.1,000 by March 2022 and providing improved training and career progression opportunities to aid retention of staff. We are continuing to develop existing and new technology to help build on recent improvements such as digital interviewing and move away from a paper-based system.

We have three key areas of focus in the short to medium term to reduce the number of outstanding asylum cases by improving efficiency and productivity, reducing the number of outstanding claims and building high performing teams. We are streamlining and digitalising the case working process to enable more effective workflow, appointment booking and decision-making.

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