Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to help reduce court backlogs.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
We have taken your question to mean what steps are being taken to tackle the outstanding caseload across all jurisdictions.
At the Crown Court, we remain committed to reducing the outstanding caseload at the Crown Court and have introduced a raft of measures to achieve this aim. We funded over 100,000 sitting days last financial year and plan to deliver the same again this financial year. Thanks to our investment in judicial recruitment, we expect to have recruited more than 1,000 judges by the end of this financial year.
We are also investing more in our courts. In August 2023, we announced we are investing £220 million for essential modernisation and repair work of our court buildings across the next two years, up to March 2025.
In the Family Court, we are working closely with the President of the Family Division, the Department for Education, HMCTS and the cross-system Family Justice Board to drive forward a cross-cutting programme of work to address delays and inefficiencies in the system and to ensure cases are ready to be heard when they reach court.
We are committed to meeting the 26-week statutory requirement for public law cases, and the Government is investing an extra £10m to develop new initiatives to support this.
In addition, we remain committed to supporting more families to reach agreement on their children and finance arrangements earlier and without court involvement and are continuing delivery of the Family Mediation Voucher Scheme. As of December 2023, over 24,000 families have successfully used the scheme to attempt to resolve their disputes outside of court. We are investing up to £23.6m in the scheme, which we intend will allow for its continuation up to March 2025
With regards to civil cases, we are taking action to ensure those that do need to go to trial are dealt with quickly. We have launched the biggest ever judicial recruitment drive for District Judges, are digitising court processes and holding more remote hearings, and are increasing the use of mediation.
We announced in July that we would introduce a requirement for small claims in the county court to attend a mediation session with the Small Claims Mediation Service, starting with specified money claims. This requirement will start in the spring and is expected to help parties resolve their dispute swiftly and consensually without the need for a judicial hearing.
With regards to tribunals, we continue to work with the Department for Business and Trade on further measures to address caseloads in the Employment Tribunal, where the deployment of legal officers, recruitment of additional judges and a new electronic case management system have already contributed to the caseload falling and remaining below its pandemic peak.
We are working on completing the programme of reform in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal and the judiciary have recently introduced a virtual region pilot to provide additional judicial capacity and flexibility in how appeals are heard and disposed of.
Asked by: Valerie Vaz (Labour - Walsall South)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many cases were waiting for a hearing date in the first tier immigration tribunal as of 1 December 2023.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The number of appeals in the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) that are waiting for a hearing date, as at 30 September 2023, is 24,085.
The Ministry of Justice publishes statistics on a quarterly basis. The latest set of data available covers the period up to 30 September 2023. Data provided in answer to this question is a sub-set of the published caseload data.
Published statistics can be found at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tribunals-statistics-quarterly-july-to-september-2023.
Asked by: Matthew Offord (Conservative - Hendon)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average length of time taken is for people whose asylum appeal has been rejected to (a) voluntarily leave and (b) be removed from the UK.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Office publishes data on returns and asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’.
Data on asylum appeals lodged and determined (including those dismissed) by year are published in tables Asy_D06 and Asy_D07 of the ‘Asylum appeals lodged and determined detailed datasets’. The data are not broken down by how many people remain in a constituency followed a dismissed asylum appeal.
Data on asylum-related returns by year and return type are published in table Ret_05 of the ‘Returns summary tables’. The data are not broken down by the constituency the individual lived in prior to their return or whether the return followed a dismissed asylum appeal.
Asked by: Matthew Offord (Conservative - Hendon)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has made an estimate of the number of individuals that remain in the Hendon constituency having had their asylum appeals rejected within the last 20 years.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Office publishes data on returns and asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’.
Data on asylum appeals lodged and determined (including those dismissed) by year are published in tables Asy_D06 and Asy_D07 of the ‘Asylum appeals lodged and determined detailed datasets’. The data are not broken down by how many people remain in a constituency followed a dismissed asylum appeal.
Data on asylum-related returns by year and return type are published in table Ret_05 of the ‘Returns summary tables’. The data are not broken down by the constituency the individual lived in prior to their return or whether the return followed a dismissed asylum appeal.
Asked by: Matthew Offord (Conservative - Hendon)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people resident in the Hendon constituency were removed after their asylum appeal was rejected in each of the last five years.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Office publishes data on returns and asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’.
Data on asylum appeals lodged and determined (including those dismissed) by year are published in tables Asy_D06 and Asy_D07 of the ‘Asylum appeals lodged and determined detailed datasets’. The data are not broken down by how many people remain in a constituency followed a dismissed asylum appeal.
Data on asylum-related returns by year and return type are published in table Ret_05 of the ‘Returns summary tables’. The data are not broken down by the constituency the individual lived in prior to their return or whether the return followed a dismissed asylum appeal.
Asked by: Catherine West (Labour - Hornsey and Wood Green)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the most common causes of gaps in the time between (a) visa or asylum appeals being approved at tribunal and (b) those decisions being implemented.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The requested information cannot be accurately extracted from our internal systems. To provide this information would require a manual trawl of successful appeals and to do so would incur disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Catherine West (Labour - Hornsey and Wood Green)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average time taken to implement (a) visa and (b) asylum appeals that were accepted at tribunal stage was in the last 12 months.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The requested information cannot be accurately extracted from our internal systems. To provide this information would require a manual trawl of successful appeals and to do so would incur disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Catherine West (Labour - Hornsey and Wood Green)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the time taken to implement visa and asylum appeals that are overturned by the tribunal court.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The requested information cannot be accurately extracted from our internal systems. To provide this information would require a manual trawl of successful appeals and to do so would incur disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Andrew Rosindell (Conservative - Romford)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to reduce waiting times for tribunal hearings.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
Tribunals within the Ministry of Justice are administered by HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) and incorporate a wide range of administrative and civil & commercial jurisdictions. The largest jurisdictions are responsible for appeals in Employment, Immigration & Asylum and Social Security & Child Support matters.
HMCTS aims to hear tribunal cases as quickly as possible and we are introducing online digital services in our larger tribunals to enable faster processing of cases and improve the customer experience. HMCTS is also recruiting additional Judges where required together with Legal Officers who will actively manage cases; and creating virtual regions in the Employment and Immigration & Asylum tribunals to hear remote cases from any region and provide additional capacity.
If an expedited hearing is requested, a Judge or Legal Officer will make a decision on that issue, taking all the circumstances into account.
Tribunal statistics are published by MoJ on GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics#tribunal-statistics-quarterly.
Asked by: Stephen Kinnock (Labour - Aberavon)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the consultation outcome, Possible changes to the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) Rules and the Upper Tribunal Rules arising from Nationality and Borders Act 2022, published by the Tribunal Procedure Committee on 27 October 2022, whether it remains the Government’s policy not to proceed with implementation of the proposed rules in relation to accelerated detained appeals, as drafted by the Tribunal Procedure Committee pursuant to section 27 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
Work is underway to bring the provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 relating to accelerated detained appeals into force as soon as possible. We cannot commit to a specific date at this point.
In due course, we will seek the Tribunal Procedural Committee's views on whether their work needs to be revisited in order to effectively implement the policy in relation to accelerated detained appeals.