Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent estimate her Department has made of the average waiting time between someone from overseas submitting an application for a visitor visa and receiving a decision.

The Home Office is currently prioritising Ukraine Visa Schemes applications in response to the humanitarian crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We are communicating directly with customers that applications for study, visits, work and family visas are taking longer to process at this time. Staff are being redeployed to these visa routes and we continue to onboard and train more staff, as we approach the expected summer surge in visa applications.

Standard visitor visa applications are currently taking on average 6 weeks to process.

Information on how UKVI is performing against service standards can be found in the migration transparency data published on the GOV.UK webpage Migration transparency data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).