Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to ensure that the processing of asylum seeker applications is timely and in accordance with the relevant guidance.

The Home Office are pursuing a programme of transformation and business improvement initiatives to speed up decision making, reduce the time people spend in the system and reduce the numbers who are awaiting an interview or decision. This includes almost doubling decision makers number to c.1,000, providing improved training and career progression opportunities to aid retention of staff. This investment in our people will speed up processing times and increase the throughput of asylum decisions.

We are continuing to develop existing and new technology to help build on recent improvements such as digital interviewing and move away from a paper-based system. We are streamlining and digitalising the case working process to enable more effective workflow, appointment booking and decision-making. Additionally, we have introduced specialist Decision Making Units, providing greater ownership and management of cohorts of asylum cases.

Asylum decision makers receive extensive mandatory training and mentoring on considering asylum claims. We have a robust quality assurance strategy in place to ensure asylum caseworkers meet the standard expected of them, and to ensure compliance with the published policy.