Mr. Peter Tyndall:

Ultimately, the decision on asylum must be a matter for the Minister but the way in which it is administered is part of public administration in the same way that most of the activities with which I deal are part of public administration. Many of the complaints that come to my office involve delays in aspects of public administration. Usually, we have been able to have an effective impact on that - sometimes on individual cases by raising them with the Department concerned and getting an immediate response for an individual but also by looking at instances where it becomes obvious to us that there are systemic delays and engaging to look in detail at processes. I will give a sense of the things we have done. When we get individual complaints and it looks like there is a pattern, we go to offices in different parts of the country and look at files from people who have not complained to us to establish whether that pattern has a systemic cause - whether we are seeing variations. The kind of things we have been able to address are variations in the way individual offices and officers deal with processes, which should not be happening as there should be consistency, and unnecessary delays. On occasions, Departments and agencies are happy when we highlight the need for change because it gives them the momentum to bring about that change or to find the resources they need in order to implement that change.