Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an assessment of the effect of removing service standards from asylum claims on the time taken to conclude those claims for (a) adult claimants and (b) minors.

Until October 2018, there was a published Service Standard in place to decide 98% of straight-forward cases within six months from date of claim. Whilst the operation consistently achieved this for three years, the number of non-straight forward cases awaiting a decision grew rapidly and it became clear that the former service standard no longer best served those that used our services. For these reasons, former Ministers agreed that we should move away from the service standard to reprioritise cases in the short term, whilst we come to longer term arrangement for service standards that meet the needs of all parties.

As a result, we moved away from the 6-month service standard to concentrate on older claims, cases with acute vulnerability and those in receipt of the greatest level of support, including Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC). That has meant some claims that would have been categorised as straightforward and received a decision within 6 months have waited longer.

However, it would be difficult to attribute this to changes to the service standard, as asylum intake has been significantly higher than expected levels since October 2018.. Published statistics show that there were 35,566 asylum applications in the UK (main applicants only) in the year ending December 2019, an increase of 21% from the previous year.

This means that despite a number of interventions, the number of claims awaiting a decision has grown.