Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people with section 3C leave are currently waiting for a decision on an outstanding application for leave to remain.

The Home Office does not hold data on how many applications are pending for leave to remain broken down by 3C status. Once a valid, in time application has been made to the Home Office (for leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain), an individual is permitted to remain in the UK on the same conditions as their most recent lawfully granted period of leave.

As we do not hold data in the format requested, the Home Office cannot provide that answer without disproportionate cost as the requested information could not be provided without a manual search of all the applications per year. However, the transparency data, which is published quarterly, provides outstanding applications by specific route and can be found here: Migration transparency data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

Customer Service Standards (CSS) are agreed departmentally and are immigration route specific. We publish our current service standards on gov.uk for both in-country and out of country applications, which includes details of current operational processing times, so customers have a realistic indication of how long their applications will take to be processed. We encourage customers to continue to refer to these updates as our processing times change on a regular basis. The link to this guidance for in-country applications is: Visa decision waiting times: applications inside the UK - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) and out of country applications is: Visa decision waiting times: applications outside the UK - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).