Ms Oonagh Buckley:

As we explained, the work Mr. Delaney and his team are doing is intended consistently to shave time off all aspects of the process. The end-to-end process review we did, which included the International Protection Office and the appeals tribunal, looked at all aspects of the decision-making chain and identified places where delays could be reduced. For example, one delay is often between people arriving and claiming international protection but not returning their questionnaire for some months. We need to try to reduce that timeframe. The work Mr. Delaney and his team have done concerns putting the questionnaire online and making it easier for people to do that.

We will also look at the legal aid side of things in due course to see whether additional supports are needed to give people help on that. Mr. Delaney is talking to a non-governmental organisation, NGO, about giving more supports around that which are not strictly speaking legal but are about people addressing that process. People can be reluctant to complete that form and nothing can happen until the questionnaire is returned. That is part of the process.

A second bad pinch point was identified by Mr. Delaney, namely, that we were getting lawyers to do the interviews and write up a report and that was coming back in and landing on the desk of a civil servant to make a recommendation and moving around various levels of the Civil Service. We have taken out one of those layers and reapplied one of the layers in the Civil Service to do the interviews directly. That expanded our capacity enormously in that pinch point in the system.

We can only do this by being quite radical about how we go about it. A third point will be when we move from a paper-based system to a fully online system. We need to be quite radical in some decisions we are taking and we are. Second, we need to shave a week off here and there. Ultimately that will bring the time back to that six months and six months.