Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of health professionals requiring a Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) have been affected by technical faults in relation to the issuing of BRP cards since March 2020.

UKVI does not hold data which would enable us to identify the number of health professionals requiring a Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) who have been affected by technical faults in relation to the issuing of BRP cards since March 2020.

Delays to customers receiving their Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) can be for various reasons, relating to their individual application. This could be as a result of the following:

• Biometrics not properly captured at the point of enrolment resulting in the BRP failing to progress to production after the decision to grant leave to remain or enter has been made.
• Delay in the verification of the National Insurance Number process between UKVI and DWP. Subject to testing, an Application Programme Interface (API) is being introduced at end of February 2021 to speed up and reduce risk of error in this process.
• A caseworker failing to request production of the BRP at point of decision.
• Variable address quality issues may result in our delivery partner FedEx failing to be able to deliver the BRP.
• Inability of FedEx to access property to deliver package securely.
• Customer failing to arrange re-delivery after first delivery attempt.
• Customer not present at address at time of delivery.
• Customers failing to keep UKVI informed in good time of change of address.
• Delays within UKVI Change of Address Team resulting in delays in updating UKVI systems with up to date addresses, plan in place to return to service level by end of May 2021.
• Customer failing to collect BRP within 90 days from a Post Office.

Action plans are in place to tackle the above issues both internally within UKVI and with our partners.

In December 2020 UKVI identified a failure relating to biometric enrolments through our overseas enrolment partner TLS, which was capturing oversized photographic images. This prevented 5,585 BRPs being produced between September 2020 and December 2020. On 22 January 2021 we wrote to all those customers affected to inform them of the problem. A technical fix was introduced on 8 February 2021, with all affected BRPs successfully printed on 9 February 2021. Customers affected were written to on 10 February 2020 informing them when their BRP will be either ready to collect from their chosen Post Office or delivered by FedEx to the address they provided during the application process.