Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum applications are awaiting approval; and what the average waiting time was for an asylum application in the latest period for which data is available.

Information regarding how many asylum claims are awaiting a decision, broken down in terms of how many have been waiting for more or less than 6 months, until the end of March 2023, is published in the Asy_D03 tab of the ‘Asylum applications, decisions, and resettlement detailed datasets’ online.

The Home Office is unable to state the average time taken to process asylum claims because this information is not routinely published and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.