Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to resolve the delays in processing settlement visa applications; and whether those delays are caused by staff shortages.

Settlement applications may be made overseas and in the UK. The percentage of straightforward out of country settlement visa applications which were completed within Service Standard was 96.5% in the first quarter of 2017 (against a target of 98.5%).

Whilst some cases have fallen outside the standard processing timescales, there are currently plans and resourcing in place to resolve outstanding cases and we expect that there will be a sustained improvement from this point onwards.

The Home Office endeavours to resolve all applications as promptly as possible, however it is also vital that the correct decisions are made, particularly with complex cases that require detailed consideration and verification of evidence. If an application is not straightforward and expected to take longer than the standard processing time, UKVI will write to the customer within the standard processing time and explain what will happen next.

The published information on processing times for visa applications is published as part of the Migration Transparency data, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-operations-transparency-data-august-2017