Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to ensure that the UK Visa and Citizenship Application Service centres and enhanced service points across the UK have sufficient capacity to handle the increase in demand that will result from the student surge period in September 2019.

UKVI officials meet with Sopra Steria Limited (SSL) on a regular basis to review performance and drive improvements to service standards. We are aware that there are issues with capacity at the moment which means customers might not always be able to book an appointment at their earliest convenience.

We are working with SSL as a matter of priority on a number of actions to increase the capacity at service points and we expect availability to increase shortly. These measures include; four additional enhanced service points in Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester and Edinburgh over the last month, increasing appointments offered to customers across a number of existing sites and reducing the cost of out of hours appointments.

Planning is underway with Sopra Steria and we are looking at a range of options to ensure that there is sufficient capacity within the service to meet demand during the student Autumn surge period.