Immigration and Visas: Applications — Written Question

Question

Rachael Maskell

Labour (Co-op) — York Central

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make it her policy to ensure that (a) all (i) visa and (ii) other immigration applications are processed within 12 months, unless there are exceptional circumstances requiring a longer processing time, and (b) whether she has a target date for completion of all such applications that have not been processed within 12 months.

Answer

Robert Jenrick

Visa and immigration applications have agreed service standards for straightforward applications which provides customers with a level of expectation of how long it should take UK Visas and Immigration to process their applications whether they were submitted inside or outside the UK. These can be found on the Gov.uk webpage: Customer service standards - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

We are taking immediate action to accelerate decision-making and rapidly speed up processing times to eliminate the backlog of legacy initial asylum decisions by the end of 2023. Separate work is ongoing to more efficiently process all other asylum claims admitted to the UK asylum system awaiting consideration.

The Home Office Transparency data sets out how the department is performing against its service standard, which can be found on the GOV.UK webpage: Migration transparency data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).