Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they have taken to assess the (1) efficiency, and (2) effectiveness, of the Home Office’s agent company TLScontact in relation to its work handling visa applications; and what reporting the Home Office requires from TLScontact for routine oversight of this work.

We closely monitor and manage the contract with TLS and robustly review how they are performing to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in handling visa applications.

This includes holding Monthly Performance Calls with TLS to assess their performance in line with the Service Level Agreement (SLA) in the contract. We have a clear governance process in place to ensure any incidents, risks and issues and capacity is managed clearly with them.

As part of the monthly reporting cycle, we request TLS produce a monthly performance report focussing on the Critical Service Levels (CSLs) and Non Critical Service Levels (NCSLs) by region and Visa Application Centre (VAC). This enables us to manage any service level failures appropriately.

Alongside this, we maintain routine oversight of TLS work by requesting incident reports, risk and issue logs, demand and capacity information and regular updates on key activities.