Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the statement by the Prime Minister on Illegal Immigration on 13 December (HC Deb cols 885–8), whether the commitment to double the number of asylum caseworkers will be delivered by (1) an increase in the number of civil servants, or (2) a redeployment of existing civil servants from other areas of work.

We have doubled the number of Asylum Decision Makers from 614 in 2021/22 to around 1,250 today through a range of recruitment exercises. We continue to recruit using standard Civil Service processes.