Recommendation 36

We asked the Home Office whether there was a need for greater transparency and improvement targets, for ‘complex’ cases. This is important as the absence of a service level agreement for ‘complex’ cases creates a risk that the Home Office will prioritise ‘straightforward’ cases, which do have a public target. The Home Office said it aims to resolve all cases as quickly as possible by monitoring workflow and moving resources when necessary, but did not provide assurance that ‘complex’ cases are not de-prioritised.101 It publishes processing statistics in its transparency data but this only provides data on the number of ‘complex’ cases, and not its performance is processing them.102 The Home Office said it has no plans to change the way its transparency statistics are reported.103