Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum seekers who have been victims of torture have been waiting for an asylum interview for two years or more; and what steps the Government is taking to expedite interviews in those cases.

This data is not held in a reportable format, not routinely published, and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

The Home Office does publish data on the number asylum applications awaiting an initial decision, by duration, for main claimant only. This data can be found in the Asy_04 tab of the published Immigration Statistics: List of tables - GOV.UK (List of tables - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk))

We are taking immediate action to rapidly speed up processing times and eliminate the backlog of people waiting for initial asylum decisions by the end of 2023.

To accelerate decision making we are driving productivity improvements by simplifying and modernising our system. This includes: shorter, more focussed interviews; removing unnecessary interviews; making guidance simpler and more accessible; dealing with cases more swiftly where they can be certified as manifestly unfounded; recruiting extra decision makers; and allocating dedicated resources for different nationalities.