Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the cost of considering asylum applications at the further submissions stage in each of the last five years.

I welcome the Hon Member to her new role, and I wish her well representing the great people of Runcorn and Helsby.

The Cabinet Office’s Guide to Parliamentary Work states that: “There is an advisory cost limit known as the disproportionate cost threshold which is the level above which departments can decide not to answer a written question. The current disproportionate cost threshold is £850.”

I regret that the information she has requested is not currently available from published statistics, and would require a manual trawl of case files to identify and collate, something that could only be done at disproportionate cost.