Asylum: Coronavirus

(asked on 9th February 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the number of asylum seekers from countries on the red list who have arrived at the UK border since March 2020.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 22nd February 2021

Asylum seekers are not going to be denied entry to the UK from red-list countries and their asylum claims will be processed as usual.

We have a legal obligation to provide asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute with accommodation, and as such the Home Office will continue to provide accommodation in which asylum seekers can self-isolate to stop to spread of Covid.

The Home Office publishes data on asylum applications in the Immigration Statistics quarterly release. Data on the number of asylum applications in each quarter, broken down by nationality is published in table Asy_D01 of the asylum detailed datasets. The latest data are to the end of September 2020, with data to the end of December 2020 due to be published on 25th February 2021. Additionally, the Home Office publishes a high-level overview of the data in the asylum and resettlement summary tables. The ‘contents’ sheet contains an overview of all available data on asylum.

The published data does not show the country from which the asylum seeker left when they began their journey (or through which country or countries the asylum seeker subsequently travelled) in order to reach the UK, or when they arrived in the UK. Some asylum seekers may have been in the UK (or another country) for some time before claiming asylum. An individual with a particular nationality may not have actually been in that country for a significant length of time prior to claiming asylum. It is therefore not possible to say from the available data whether or not the individual has recently travelled from a ‘red list’ country.

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