Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what targets her Department has in place for reducing the backlog of applications for (a) Leave and Indefinite Leave to Remain, (b) citizenship and (c) passports.

(a) We have faced extremely high pressures in the past two 2 years in relation to visa application routes, including leave to remain and indefinite leave to remain. All routes have seen extremely high demand following the end of the pandemic and the easing of travel restrictions. We also prioritised capacity earlier this year to help people forced to flee their homes as a result of President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine get to safety. We have worked hard to reduce processing times and we are now back within service standard across a number of our routes, but we continue to further improve the speed of our decision making by rolling out better, more efficient technology, including digital interviewing and moving away from a paper based system and also recruiting more decision making staff.

(b) Our website provides up-to-date information on our visa processing times across the routes we offer, and we encourage customers to continue to refer to these updates as our performance changes on a regular basis. At the same time, we continue to prioritise any urgent, compelling, or compassionate case. The most recent published data on citizenship applications (August 2022) shows that of those straightforward applications received, the percentage completed within the Service Standard of six months was 98.4%. The latest information on processing times can be found in the UK Visas and Immigration Transparency Data, available on Gov.uk.

(c) Between January and August, 95.3% of standard UK applications were processed within the published guidance of ten weeks, and the volume of applications outside of this processing time continues to fall.

Passport demand is highly seasonal. As is always the case in the autumn and winter, His Majesty’s Passport Office is working to reduce its overall work in progress ahead of demand increasing again from January.