Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, on 1 October 2022, (a) how many asylum claims were awaiting decision (b) how many Indefinite Leave to Remain applications were outstanding and not decided and (c) how many passport applications had waited longer than 12 weeks to be processed fully.

a) The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on asylum applications awaiting a decision can be found in table Asy_D03 of the ‘asylum and resettlement detailed datasets’. Information on how to use the datasets can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbooks.

Please note the data show a snapshot as at the last day of each quarter, rather than the number of asylum applications awaiting a decision over the entire quarter. The latest data relates to as at 30 June 2022. Data as at 30 September 2022 will be published on 24 November 2022.

Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’.

b) As we do not hold data in the format requested, the Home Office cannot provide that answer without disproportionate cost, as the requested information could not be provided without a manual search of all the applications per year.

c) Of the passport applications that completed processing in the week ending 2 October, 5,631 had been with His Majesty’s Passport Office for more than 12 weeks. This includes international applications with a published indicative processing time of more than 12 weeks. Figures come from a live database which is constantly changing and therefore these numbers are subject to change.