Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to improve processing times for asylum applications.

The Home Office is developing comprehensive plans to improve processing times.

The Asylum Transformation programme aims to bring the system back into balance and modernise it. It is focused on increasing productivity by streamlining, simplifying and digitising processes to speed up decision making to increase efficiency and output.

We have increased the number of asylum caseworkers by 80% from 597 staff in 2019/20 to more than 1,000 today. We are on course for a further 500 people by March 2023, which would take our total to approximately 1,500. We are planning fresh recruitment of decision makers to ensure that vacancies can be filled quickly, and to build a sustainably resourced decision-making system. In addition, we have implemented a recruitment and retention allowance which has reduced Decision Maker attrition rates by 30%, helping us maintain experienced asylum Decision Makers.