Robert Jenrick – 2022 Speech on Visa Processing Times

The speech made by Robert Jenrick, the Minister for Immigration, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons, on 14 December 2022.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I am grateful to the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) for securing the debate and to hon. Members from across the House who have joined us, no doubt sharing the hon. Lady’s concerns.

My door is always open for individual cases. If the hon. Lady would like to give me the details of the cases she raised after the debate, I would be happy to look into them, but she is right that it should not take a request to a Minister to get the good service that the Home Office and our agencies should be delivering routinely. The concerns that she has raised are important to me and to the team behind the visas and immigration service.

In my short time in the Home Office, I have been impressed by the good work that the team has done in recent months to turn around some of the delays that we have experienced in recent years. The hon. Lady very fairly mentioned that two huge events have affected the performance of UKVI. First, the pandemic affected productivity in all areas of the public sector and the private sector. It has taken us time, as it has other developed countries, to regain the level of customer service that we would like to offer. In most areas, the UK is actually in a better position than our direct competitors around the world, but of course we aspire to be in that position—or, indeed, to go further.

The second factor is Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. My predecessors made the right decision to transfer a great deal of the workers in the Home Office and UKVI to work on the Homes for Ukraine scheme so that we could get those visas issued as expeditiously as possible, but that did come at a cost to some of our other visa customer standards. It is now our hope that we can quickly recover that lost ground and bring each of the visa categories into line with the service standard as quickly as possible. The good news is that in most cases that has now happened. In the small number of cases in which it is not happening, it will happen very soon. I have been meeting regularly with Marc Owen, who leads the service, and have been impressed by the work that he has done to turn it around in recent months.

I will go through a couple of the principal areas that have been raised, just to give some comfort that we are very alive to these issues. Despite the need to take resource off the emergency situation in Ukraine and restore the service that the rest of the visas and immigration service needs to deliver, it remains important that we process applications under the Homes for Ukraine scheme quickly. If the hon. Member for North East Fife gives me details of the cases she mentioned, I will happily take them forwards, but we are generally processing applications in a matter of days. If some are taking longer, that is clearly concerning; it may be that there is something specific about those cases, but I will happily look into them.

Before my arrival in the Department, an entirely reasonable decision was taken to make work and study our national priority. We need to get the economy going again after the pandemic, and we needed to get students who had left because of covid back into the country, in order for universities to get going again. Resources were put in place to ensure that those visas were decided quickly. The number of cases was very high, as can be seen from the net migration statistics, which were published recently. The number of foreign students who have entered the UK in the past 12 months has been exceptionally high, and more than 590,000 study visas had been processed by the end of September 2022.

I am interested in the hon. Lady’s example from St Andrews University. The national statistics show that we are meeting the study route customer service standard. The 15-day service is being met. In fact, it is averaging 11 days for a standard study visa. For leave to remain—the more complex and longer-term settlement cases—we have an eight-week standard, and that is at six weeks currently. In general terms, therefore, we are meeting the standard, but that is not to diminish the cases that she raised, which again I will happily take up.

Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)

I congratulate the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) on securing the debate. I have had a case in my constituency of a sixth-form student who was already studying at a sixth-form college, but who ran foul of the visa rules and had difficulty re-entering to continue their course. It is not necessarily about the easy cases here; it is about how we deal with what was called the long tail of casework. Some cases are still taking several months to clear up, which is interfering with student studies and sometimes with the supply of staff. I wonder what the Minister might be able to do to address that issue.

Robert Jenrick

I will happily look into that. As I say, the overall standard is being met and indeed exceeded—that was not always the case, but it is where we are now—but my hon. Friend is probably right that there is a longer tail of complex cases, which clearly take longer. It is important that the Department looks after those individuals to the same standard.

Wendy Chamberlain

I thank the Minister for giving way—he is being generous with his time. There is absolutely no doubt that the student situation has improved massively, and my casework team would acknowledge that, but the issue is the work visas of people coming for research or employment with the university. It will degrade the university’s reputation if people coming to deliver courses to students cannot get here.

Robert Jenrick

Without repeating myself, I am happy to look into those cases. There is a conflict here between the standard practice and the cases the hon. Lady is raising. Again, that is not to diminish what she is saying, because there are without doubt cases where we are not performing as we would wish.

It is fair to say that the overall picture for work visas is mixed. For non-sponsored work visas, we are falling below the standard that we aspire to, which is 15 days; we are averaging 36 days, according to the latest statistics that I have seen. For the sponsored routes, which have been given priority by the Department for understandable reasons—this is where an employer is actively seeking for a person to come to the UK as swiftly as possible—the opposite is true. Our 15-day target is being exceeded; we are processing those claims in eight days on average. However, we would like to bring all those categories into line with our service standards as quickly as possible.

For visitors to the UK, we are also now in a much better position that we were recently, which helps with the return of international tourism to the UK. Generally, we are now at or exceeding the customer service standard that we aspire to, which is between 14 and 21 days to turn around an application.

The area where I think there is still room for improvement is family visas, which a number of hon. Members raised today. For the settlement visas, we are about in the position that we would like to be in, which is that we are turning cases around in 93 days. That is still a long time in the real world for someone who wants to get a loved one into the country for important reasons, so I appreciate that, although we might be achieving our customer service target, it is probably not the target that we as a country aspire to. We would like to improve on that.

Wendy Chamberlain

Will the Minister give way?

Robert Jenrick

I will, but let me just finish the point. For spouses and partners looking for either leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain, the overall picture is much better. For leave to remain, we have a target of eight weeks. We are currently processing claims in three weeks. For indefinite leave to remain, we have a much longer target, of 26 weeks, but we are processing those claims within 10 weeks. Overall, the team has done a good job of turning around those times, but I appreciate that the hon. Member for North East Fife has some examples that tell a different story. Perhaps in the time remaining she would like to intervene one last time.

Wendy Chamberlain

I appreciate the Minister giving way for a final time. It is interesting that he admits that family visas are where the poorest performance is. That goes back to the very first point I made at the start of the debate: the Home Office does not have a target time for those visas. It is very good that the Minister is giving us data that shows that some tracking is happening, but perhaps if he agreed to set a target the performance would improve.

Robert Jenrick

We do have targets for those claims. I have been happy to read some of the targets today. For each visa category, we set our own internal customer service target, and as Ministers we push the team to deliver on it. Those targets can progressively be improved, now that we are out of the long shadow of covid and are able to move some of the resource that was on the Homes for Ukraine scheme back on to business-as-usual processes. I hope that, in the early months of next year, each visa cohort will be brought to, or will exceed, our customer service standard. Then I, as the responsible Minister, will be able to work with the team to set better targets that provide an even better quality of service to the hon. Lady and all our constituents across the country.

Munira Wilson

On the length of time the Minister cited for spousal visas, in our experience 26 weeks is much closer to the reality on the ground. Will he clarify for our constituents and caseworkers what the criteria for getting a case expedited are? The example I gave was not considered worth expediting.

Robert Jenrick

I do not have the exact criteria with me. I am happy to have a conversation with the hon. Lady to give her some further guidance, but it is fair to say that some of the cases that we receive cannot be expedited, even though they relate to what many of us would regard as important life events, such as an individual’s decision to get married. It is the Home Office’s advice that someone should get their visa before setting the date for their wedding. The issues that we take most seriously are obviously those of life and death, where individuals need to come into the country for a funeral or to see a relative or loved one just before they pass away. A high standard has to be applied, because we receive thousands of requests for expedited cases that relate to important life events and heartfelt issues. We have to set a high standard to ensure that we can truly prioritise important events.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for North East Fife for raising this matter. As I said, I will be more than happy to look into the specific cases that she, or indeed other Members, raised.