Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that decisions on UK visas are made within expected service standards.

UKVI has faced extremely high pressures in the past two years. All visa routes have seen extremely high demand following the end of the pandemic, easing of travel restrictions and helping people forced to flee their homes as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

The Home Office is working hard to speed up decision-making by rolling out better, more efficient technology, including digital interviewing and moving away from a paper-based system. We are also continuing to recruit more decision-making staff

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).