Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people from Afghanistan who claimed asylum in the UK were returned to that country during the period when coalition forces were active there.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The number of returns from the UK of nationals of Afghanistan to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2018 is published in table rt_04 (returns data tables, volume 4) in ‘Immigration Statistics, year ending March 2019’, available from the GOV.uk website at:
Information on returns prior to 2004 is not comparable with more recent years; however data on the number of enforced removals and voluntary returns for the period 2000 to 2003 can be obtained from the National Archives under the title Control of Immigration: Statistics, United Kingdom.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many Afghanistani interpreters who worked for (a) British forces and (b) NATO forces during the Afghanistan conflict have been granted asylum in the UK.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The Home Office are unable to report on how many Afghanistani interpreters who worked for (a) British Forces and (b) NATO forces during the Afghanistan conflict, have been granted asylum in the UK. This information is recorded on individual Home Office files, but not in a way that can be easily retrieved, and this information could only be obtained at disproportionate costs.
The Home Office does publish data on those who have been granted asylum in the UK, for main applicants broken down by country of nationality, including those from Afghanistan. The latest release published 24th May 2019, can be found in tab as_01 at volume 1 of the quarterly Immigration Statistics release:
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many officials in his Department have been seconded away from their normal duties to work on the UK's withdrawal from the EU; and what effect that secondment of staff has had on the effectiveness of his Department.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
The department has been continually assessing the resourcing levels required to prepare for EU Exit across all possible scenarios, developing contingency plans in line with government policy. It is not possible to provide the number of staff who have been moved from normal duties. This is because staff are generally engaged across a range of workstreams, which will include business as usual activity as well as EU Exit preparations, across all scenarios.
To release existing capacity on to specialist roles to support the UK’s exit from the EU in an orderly manner, the Home Office took a number of reprioritisation choices in early 2019 to release capacity on to critical EU Exit roles. This was undertaken as part of a cross-government reprioritisation exercise.
As a general principle, reprioritisation decisions within the Home Office focussed on areas of its domestic work which could be scaled back or slowed, thus alleviating the need to halt these areas of work in their entirety whilst fulfilling the need to release the required numbers of specialist resource on to critical EU Exit roles.
To minimise the overall demand for internal reprioritisation, the Home Office also sought to secure resource through the Cabinet Office clearing hub, a government-wide initiative set up to meet the demands of EU Exit through cross-departmental redeployment of resource across policy and operational delivery roles.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have provided further submissions for their asylum claims after initially having their claim refused in each of the last five years.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
Home Office records report that, between 1 January 2014 and 31 December 2018, a total of 28,953 people lodged Further Submissions after initially having their asylum claim refused. A breakdown for each year is provided in the table below.
Since March 2015, the Home Office has required non-detained refused asylum seekers to lodge Further Submissions by appointment at the Further Submissions Unit based in Liverpool.
The figures in the table note how many people lodged a Further Submission at the Further Submissions Unit, and how many people lodged their submission by a different route, including cases where a Further Submission was raised in detention and cases where a Further Submission is raised during the Family Returns Process.
Table showing breakdown of people who made Further Submissions following refusal of asylum between 2014 and 2018
| Year | Submission not made in person in Liverpool | Submission made in person at Further Submissions Unit in Liverpool | (Total) |
| 2014 | - | - | 4,521 |
| 2015 | 1,971 | 2,124 | 4,095 |
| 2016 | 1,420 | 3,324 | 4,744 |
| 2017 | 1,546 | 5,053 | 6,599 |
| 2018 | 1,618 | 7,376 | 8,994 |
| (Total) | 6,555 | 17,877 | 28,953 |
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people of the Windrush generation have been refused UK citizenship in each year since 2010 as a result of having a criminal record.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
We are unable to provide the information requested as this would involve undertaking a manual trawl of individual cases which would incur dispropor-tionate cost.
The number of overall refusals and those refused on criminality grounds for all citizenship casework is published as part of the Migration Transparency data, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/immigration-statistics-year-ending-december-2018/list-of-tables#citizenship - cz_09 for all refusals of citizenship by main reason.
Additionally, the Home Secretary provides regular updates to the Home Af-fairs Select Committee on the work of the Department in connection with Windrush. These updates can be found at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/correspondence-on-the-work-of-the-home-office-windrush
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many Windrush generation people were refused UK citizenship as a result of a (a) prison sentence of (i) over four years, (ii) between two and four years, (iii) between 12 months and two years, (iv) 12 months or less, (b) community order, (c) fine ,(d) caution, (e) reprimand and (f) formal warning.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
We are unable to provide the information requested as this would involve undertaking a manual trawl of individual cases which would incur dispropor-tionate cost.
The number of overall refusals and those refused on criminality grounds for all citizenship casework is published as part of the Migration Transparency data, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/immigration-statistics-year-ending-december-2018/list-of-tables#citizenship - cz_09 for all refusals of citizenship by main reason.
Additionally, the Home Secretary provides regular updates to the Home Af-fairs Select Committee on the work of the Department in connection with Windrush. These updates can be found at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/correspondence-on-the-work-of-the-home-office-windrush
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when the Minister of State for Immigration plans to respond to the letter from the hon. Member for Tottenham dated 14 November 2018.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
I can confirm that a response was dispatched on 20 December 2018.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many re-documentation interviews have taken place for Zimbabwean citizens in each of the last 12 months.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The information requested is not held in a reportable format.
Interviews for re-documentation are a standard part of Home Office engagement with the countries of return. Interviews take place at the request of the receiving country to confirm the nationality and identity of the person being returned in order for a travel document to be produced and only occur after an immigration application has been refused or a decision to return has been made.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what criteria his Department uses to decide on the eligibility for a re-documentation interview.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The information requested is not held in a reportable format.
Interviews for re-documentation are a standard part of Home Office engagement with the countries of return. Interviews take place at the request of the receiving country to confirm the nationality and identity of the person being returned in order for a travel document to be produced and only occur after an immigration application has been refused or a decision to return has been made.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many re-documentation interviews have been conducted in each of the past 12 months for each nationality of interviewee.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The information requested is not held in a reportable format.
Interviews for re-documentation are a standard part of Home Office engagement with the countries of return. Interviews take place at the request of the receiving country to confirm the nationality and identity of the person being returned in order for a travel document to be produced and only occur after an immigration application has been refused or a decision to return has been made.