Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to (a) prioritise applications for asylum and (b) reduce waiting times for those applications.

To accelerate decision making we are streamlining and modernising the end-to-end process, with improved guidance, enhancing use of digital technology, and introducing more efficient ways to handling claims.

We have already doubled our decision makers over the last 2 years, and we are continuing to recruit more. This will take our expected number of decision makers to 1,800 by this summer and 2,500 by September 2023.

We are making good progress and, as of the end of May 2023 (based on provisional data), the legacy backlog has reduced by over 17,000 cases since the end of November 2022.