Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many Syrian refugees of each religious group his Department has (a) recommended to be resettled by the UN; and (b) agreed to resettle in the UK in each quarter of each of the last four years.

The UK’s resettlement programmes follow the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality, which means that we resettle solely based on needs identified by UNHCR through their established processes, rather than on the basis of ethno-religious origin.

We believe that one way to protect the privacy of those being resettled and support their recovery and integration is to limit the amount of information about them that we make publicly available.

We therefore do not routinely publish a religious and ethnic breakdown of those who have been resettled, however internal management information indicates that the majority of Syrian refugees referred by UNHCR, and resettled to the UK are Muslim, with Christians and other religious groups represented in smaller numbers.