Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of allowing visa applicants to receive a digital permission to travel documentation.

We have already outlined our ambitions to develop a border and immigration system which is “digital by default”, which means we will increasingly replace physical and paper-based products and services with accessible, easy to use online and digital services.

Our ambition is to have physical documents replaced by eVisas (whereby individuals have access to online evidence of their immigration status information) by the end of 2024. This change is being rolled out incrementally and we will continue to take into consideration the characteristics of each cohort as we do so, to ensure no one is left behind as we move to a digital system.