Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people seeking asylum have been waiting for their (a) substantive interview or (b) decision on their application for over (i) six, (ii) 12 months; if she has a target timeframe for applicants to receive a substantive interview; and if she will make a statement.

The Home Office maintains good working relationship with national and local organisations who support asylum seekers, We also have our strategic partnerships; including the Strategic Engagement Group (SEG) and National Asylum Stakeholder Forum (NASF), who we work collaboratively with to ensure asylum remains one of our top priorities to improve the service we provide.

We will continue to support conversations on improving the health and wellbeing of asylum seekers via the Refugee Council chaired Mental Health Forum. This forum is informed by representatives from across the NGO sector, Home Office, Department of Health and Social Care, Public Health England and NHS England and NHS Improvement bringing those with customer informed insight together to consider approaches to mental health support.

The Home Office does not currently have a target time for processing application for asylum but we are committed to ensuring that asylum claims are considered without unnecessary delay. Asylum Operations are working to reintroduce a service standard.

Our intention to reintroduce a service standard aligns with the recommendation from the recent Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration’s (ICIBI) published report - An inspection of asylum casework (November 2021).

The Asylum Transformation programme is working to improve the asylum system and continue to streamline and simplify processes to speed up decision making to increase efficiency and output. The development and delivery of changes to the asylum process across the end-to-end asylum system include the increased use of technology, improved screening and accelerated decision-making procedures to drive delivery efficiency. Additionally, we are increasing the number of asylum decision makers and currently recruiting to this role

The Home Office are unable to state how many people seeking asylum have been waiting for their substantive interview for over six or 12 months because this information can only be obtained at disproportionate costs.

However, we do publish data on Asylum applications awaiting a decision, by duration and can be found at Asy_04 of the Asylum and Resettlement summary tables:

List of tables - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)