Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps his Department is taking (a) to facilitate timely decision-making on outstanding applications for relocation to the UK under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and (b) to provide regular updates to individuals with applications outstanding.

We continue to receive a high number of applications, however, the majority of these are duplicates or are ineligible under the Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy (ARAP) scheme.

Considerable amounts of time, resources and personnel have been, and continue to be, deployed to ensure that applications are considered as quickly efficiently, accurately and fairly as possible. We are now actively processing and issuing decisions on more applications per month than we are receiving and have improved communications with applicants.

The regularity of application updates is specific to each case and is dependent on a number of factors, such as the amount of evidence received on an initial application, the level of complexity of the case, the need to conduct checks with other government departments, or the length of time it takes an applicant to respond to follow-up queries.