To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what his Department's policy is on informing applicants if the time taken to process their application is longer than the published service standard as a result of technical issues.

Where there is a technical issue which prevents caseworkers from taking action on a case, the department will seek to address these as quickly as possible and resolve these so the case can be completed within its service standard. Where the technical issue may cause the case to go out of service standard, caseworking teams will write to the customer to inform them of the delay and keep them informed of progress.

The latest published statistics which includes data on performance against Service Level Agreement for Standard, Priority and Super Priority visas up to the end of Q3 2023 can be found in this link (Data tab VSI_02): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/visas-and-citizenship-data-q3-2023.

Q4 2023 stats are due to be published shortly.