Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average duration of appeal proceedings on first instance decisions on asylum applications was in the last twelve months for which data is available.

The average clearance time, from receipt to disposal, of an asylum appeal in the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber, over the last 12 months for which data are available

(1 October 2018 to 30 September 2019), was:

These figures are from internal management information extracted from the tribunal’s case management system. They do not form part of the published statistics.

Tribunal statistics are 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 20,300 between July 2016 and September 2019. The average duration across all case types has also improved from 52 weeks in the period July to September 2017 to 34 weeks in the period July to September 2019.