Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 8 February to Question 126582 on asylum: finance, what criteria her Department uses to assess its business needs; and to which actions her Department will allocate funding in 2018.

Management of the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) in the UK is vested in the European Funding Team acting as the AMIF Responsible Authority (UKRA).

The UKRA manages the funds to try and meet the objectives set out in the published AMIF National Programme, set out in Section 5 of the programme on ‘Common Indicators’. This is what the UK set out to achieve with AMIF funding over the course of the programme. The UKRA will review progress against these objectives when deciding where to focus funding, whilst still looking at funding across the programme objectives.

AMIF has 3 Specific Objectives that the UK takes part in, Asylum, Integration and Returns. In the initial National Programme the UK agreed to fund these objectives at 20% of the allocation for each of Asylum and Integration, with 54% allocated to Returns activities. There was a slight re-prioritisation of funds from Returns to Integration as a result of a mid-term review with the European Commission, based on the larger number of refugees in the UK since the Programme was drawn up in 2013.

For the purpose of clarity it may be useful to set out the definition of AMIF funding years, in that it operates from 16/10/n – 15/10/n+1, therefore the 2018 AMIF year will be 16/10/17 – 15/10/18.

Currently in the UK there are 14 AMIF funded projects, 6 under the Asylum objective, 2 under Integration and 6 under Returns. All these projects are operated by the Home Office. A complete list of funded projects is published on www.gov.uk, for projects up to each July.

The UKRA currently has an ‘open call for proposals’ asking for applications for funding for projects to deal with refugee integration. The value of this call for proposals is £40m. The closing date for applications is 09/05/18, with an expectation that successful applications will be starting from 01/08/18.

For further information the UK Responsible Authority can be contacted at: AMIFEnquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk