Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to tackle the backlog of asylum applications.

We have transformed the productivity of asylum decision making by streamlining processes, creating focused interviews and instilling accountability for performance. And as of 1 September, we have met our commitment to have 2,500 decision makers, an increase of 174% from the same point last year.

As a result, I am pleased to report to the House that we are on track to clear the legacy backlog by the end of the year, and that recently published provisional figures for July show that the overall backlog fell.