I acknowledge that the first-in, first-out principle is an operating principle. It's a great one, but at times it just can't function.
I'll give you an example. If an application comes in and what's missing is a key immigration document, you can request it and then move on to the next file, but if you have to wait for that document to come in, then all subsequent files are delayed needlessly waiting for that file. There needs to be a bit of a balance.
What we found was that operational pressures to meet the immigration level targets drove a behaviour whereby easy-to-process applications were sometimes treated more quickly. We saw that by analyzing the age of what was sitting in the backlog.