§ Baroness Gould of Potternewtonasked Her Majesty's Government:
What plans they have to change the procedures for dealing with applications for British citizenship. [HL1513]
§ Lord Bassam of BrightonDuring April 2001, the Integrated Casework Directorate (ICD) of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) will devote some of its resources to starting applications for British citizenship on receipt. All cases, at both ends of the queue for consideration, will be considered using new procedures and working practices. New applicants will be asked to supply supporting documentation at the time of application and to respond more quickly to requests for further information than has previously been the case. The aim of these changes is to eliminate the current backlog of nationality applications by attacking it from both ends. This approach has been successfully used elsewhere in IND—for example, in the production of travel documents.
ICD will have achieved its target of 91,000 decisions by the end of March 2001, which is more than twice the total for 1997. By the end of February 2001, the average waiting time for all types of citizenship applications had fallen to exactly 12 months, as 61WA compared with nearly 20 months at the same time last year. These improvements flow from significantly increased investment in the system and the new service delivery culture now becoming established in the ICD.
Because of these improvements, ICD is now in a position to deal with the remaining backlog of work from both ends, cutting out unnecessary handling. This approach has proved very successful in other parts of IND's work. More resources will continue to be devoted to those applications that have been waiting longest, but the ICD's intention is to reduce the waiting time for all applications to an average of six months by April 2002 and to three months by April 2004.