Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average time taken for a defined certificate of sponsorship to be approved is; what assessment she has made of backlogs for defined certificate of sponsorship applications; and what steps she is taking to resolve those backlogs.

The Home Office does not routinely capture data on the processing times for defined certificates of sponsorship.

UK Visas and Immigration has been experiencing an unprecedented high volume of applications, with around 30% referred back to the sponsor to provide further information which also contributes to the time taken to process them.

Significant additional resource has been allocated to the case work team, to progress outstanding cases.