Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many landing cards have been destroyed in each of the last eight years.

There are two different types of landing cards, “non-controlled” or “controlled”. Non-controlled cards (which account for c.95% of all non-EEA arrivals in 2016) are kept for a maximum of 28 days before they are destroyed.

Controlled cards relate mainly to those passengers who arrive in the UK for non-visit purposes such as settlement and this data is retained for 15 years.

We do not record centrally the number of landing cards destroyed.

The available published information on the number of non-EEA nationals entering the UK is published in Home Office’s Immigration Statistics, year ending March 2018, Admission table ad_01 available from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/709292/admissions-mar-2018-tables.ods

During the period 2010 to 2017 the number of non-EEA passengers granted leave to enter the UK was more than 118 million.