Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many staff have been employed to process visa applications in each of the last 10 years.

UK Visas and Immigration regularly reviews its capacity plans and resources and redeploys staff where necessary to help meet and maintain service standards for individual services or routes.

However, to provide the number of officials usually employed to process visa applications across the business in each of the last ten years would require a manual check through resourcing databases, and would encounter disproportionate costs.

Data on staffing within UK Visas & Immigration is published online at:https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/migration-transparency-data#staffing-data

For information, UKVI figures are published quarterly on gov.uk from 2014 at https://www.gov.uk/search?q=border-and-immigration-cross-cutting-data

Previous to this, UKBA data can be found in the Annual Report & Accounts –

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/120048/annual-report-201011.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/143619/annual-report-2011-12.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/home-office-annual-report-and-accounts-2012-to-2013