Stephen Timms – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2015-10-14.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans she has to reduce the time taken to process asylum applications.

James Brokenshire

We have an ongoing recruitment campaign to ensure we maintain our levels of decision makers and have also began work to further improve on the efficiency of our interview and decision-making process across case work teams. We have significantly improved our suite of guidance on considering asylum claims, including key instructions on asylum interviews and assessing credibility. We have also streamlined processes by reducing the volume of paperwork required and cutting duplication in the asylum process, including improvements to the way in which decisions are explained to applicants in correspondence to make it easier to understand. These changes are designed to support caseworkers to improve decision quality and efficiency to ensure we grant protection where it is needed whilst refusing unfounded claims more quickly, whilst also ensuring a more customer focused approach. We aim to decide straightforward asylum claims within six months.