Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when her Department plans to commence covid-secure face-to-face substantive asylum interviews.

The Home Office takes the wellbeing of asylum seekers extremely seriously and has put in place a range of measures to support asylum seekers affected by the covid-19 outbreak.

Asylum Operations have been clear it would not restart substantive asylum interviews until it was safe to do so. We are now able to ensure safe social distancing of our staff and customers and restarted remote video interviewing for adults from 17th July 2020.

On 21st September 2020, we recommenced with face to face substantive interviews for adults. On the same date, we also commenced remote video interviewing for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC).

We are focused on increasing the number of interviews at pace and working towards returning back to pre-COVID-19 levels as soon as we are able.

Information on video conference interviews with UASCS is not routinely published.