Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what consultation her Department carried out with Liverpool City Council in advance of the recent decision by her Department to make Liverpool the place failed asylum seekers must go to lodge their final appeals.

The new process applies only to failed asylum seekers whose claims have already been carefully considered by UK Visas and Immigration and had their cases examined and found by the independent courts not to need protection or have any other basis to stay in the UK. It is not an appeals process.

The decision to centralise this work in Liverpool was taken to significantly improve customer service and speed up decision making, enabling UKVI to grant protection more quickly to those who need it and remove those who have no right to be here.

These changes represent an extension of the Further Submissions Unit in Liverpool, which has been successfully dealing with Further Submissions for pre 2007 cases for at least five years, at times in far higher numbers than we envisage will be generated from this work. The Older Live Cases Unit in Liverpool, including the Further Submissions team, achieved Customer Service Excellence last year, and received positive feedback from many applicants and stakeholders.

As this was an extension of a pre-existing service, with no identified impact on the City of Liverpool or its services, no reason for consultation was identified. We also believe that early public consultation would have led to a rush of further submissions. As a courtesy we have paused implementation to discuss further with the Council and address their concerns.