Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the impact of IT issues in her Department on (a) processing times for Skilled Worker visa applications and (b) Skilled Worker visa applications where the applicant has paid for the priority service.

In August 2022, some applications processed through the Atlas Caseworking system were impacted by a number of unrelated IT incidents which were spread across the end -to -end case-working digital platform. These issues were varied and due to some initial delays in being able to identify them, some customers directly informed us of delays in their applications.

A programme of IT stabilisation was commissioned and good progress has been made to date in both understanding and tackling the root causes of these incidents and also proactively identifying issues when they happen, before they adversely affect customers.

The total number of incidents being raised in early 2023 has fallen by more than half and IT Support continues to focus on resolving the underlying issues and creating better proactive reporting, removing the impact on customers and wider case-working service standards.