Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve (1) accountability, (2) transparency, and (3) value for money, in recording the average time it takes to process asylum seeker applications from the initial claim to the date of final interview.

The Home Office remains committed to routinely publishing information which shows the number of cases in the entire asylum system outstanding to improve accountability, transparency and value for money. However, some data we are unable to provide as it is not easily aggregated, can only be obtained at disproportionate costs or not held in a reportable format.

Data on case age and Asylum Operations costs and productivity can be found in ASY_03 and ASY_04 of the published Transparency data (also attached)

Immigration and protection data: Q1 2022 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Whilst there are a number of older outstanding cases in the system, these are more complex cases which generally have barriers that causes delays in the time taken to process an asylum seeker application from the initial date of claim to the date of final interview. These barriers are often varied and require time to clear, but our teams are actively working to clear and progress these enable the final interview to take place.