Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to increase the rate of processing of asylum applications.

The Home Office is working at pace to reduce the number of outstanding asylum claims which has been caused by record levels of illegal migration.

We have already increased the number of caseworkers by 80% to more than 1,000. We are continuing to hire more caseworkers, streamline processes and make better use of technology to get the asylum backlog down

A successful pilot scheme has seen the average number of asylum claims processed by caseworkers double and we are now rolling this out across the country.

The asylum transformation programme aims to bring the system back into balance and modernise it, focussing on increasing productivity by streamlining, simplifying and digitalising processes, speeding up decision making and increasing efficiency and output.