Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department has taken to ensure the (a) adequacy and (b) consistency of guidance provided in non-straightforward asylum cases.

The decision to designate a case as ‘non straight forward’ must be discussed and agreed by an officer at least the grade of a Senior Executive Officer to ensure it is applied appropriately. In addition the guidance on these cases has recently been reviewed and redistributed across asylum teams to ensure it is applied consistently and that it does not discriminate against any individual groups.

Asylum Intake and Casework Senior Management have been in consultation with staff and partners on the new service standards and it is intended that these will be introduced later this year

Information regarding Asylum data is published as part of the Government’s Transparency agenda the latest release of which can be found at can be found at tab as 01q https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/immigration-statistics-july-to-september-2017/list-of-tables#asylum. This shows that in from April to September there were 9,883 asylum decisions made.