Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent estimate she has made of the average waiting time for immigration appeals to be heard at tribunal from the time the appeal is lodged, for (a) all tribunals, (b) asylum tribunals, (c) family visit visa tribunals and (d) entry clearance officer tribunals; and what additional resources have been allocated to tackling the backlog of immigration appeals as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.

The average waiting time from the lodgement of the appeal to first hearing for the period January to March 2020 is a) for all appeals - 17 weeks and b) for asylum appeals - 8 weeks.

Family visit visa and Entry clearance officer appeals no longer exist as separate appeal categories. The other appeal categories are Human Rights appeals and Out of country appeals and their waiting times for the same period are 22 weeks and 34 weeks respectively.

These figures are from internal Management Information extracted from the tribunal’s case management system. They do not form part of the published tribunal statistics published on a quarterly basis and are available at: www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics

HM Courts & Tribunals Service has worked extensively to reduce the outstanding caseload and improve timeliness in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber. This has seen the live caseload in the First-tier Tribunal reduce by more than two-thirds, from 64,800 to 19,533 between July 2016 and March 2020. Our focus is now on maximising our capacity to reduce the growth and volume of our outstanding work.

We will build the number of face to face hearings; our hearing centres were never officially closed even though all hearings were of course suspended.

We are working closely with the judiciary to increase the number of hearings by expanding our capacity for remote audio and video hearings; and ensuring that we can build the number of face to face hearings as soon as it is safe to do so and in line with public health advice and guidance.