Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to ensure asylum seekers are not penalised if questionnaires are sent to previous addresses following relocation.

We need to make sure asylum seekers do not spend months or years - living in the UK at vast expense to the taxpayer - waiting for a decision. That is why the Prime Minister has made a commitment to clear the historical asylum backlog by the end of the year.

As part of this commitment, 12,000 asylum seekers who lodged asylum claims before 28 June 2022 are going to be considered through a Streamlined Asylum Process. This will involve eligible claimants being sent a questionnaire to their correspondence address asking them to provide all the necessary information so claims can be considered more quickly. This will speed up decisions for those in genuine need, ending the uncertainty over their future, and help us remove people with no right to be here.

Claimants who receive an asylum questionnaire will have 20 working days to respond. If the questionnaire is not returned within the timeframe, we will make further attempts to contact eligible claimants and they will receive a reminder via post, email and phone (where they have made their contact details available to the Home Office), and a further 10 working days to complete the questionnaire. Extensions can be requested by contacting the Home Office.

All relevant individual circumstances will be considered, on a case-by-case basis when deciding whether someone’s asylum claim should be withdrawn. Asylum claims will not be withdrawn if there is a reasonable explanation