Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum seekers were charged with a criminal offence since entering the UK in each year since 2015.

After further conversation with MOJ colleagues, please see amended response to your written question;

The number of people charged with a criminal offence will be data held by the Police, the number of asylum seekers within that total will be a subset. It’s not information we hold.

All asylum claimants are subject to mandatory security checks to confirm their identity and to link it to their biometric details for the purpose of immigration, security and criminality checks. These checks are critical to the delivery of a safe and secure immigration system.

If the asylum claimant is aged 16 years or over, their fingerprints will be checked against those fingerprints held on the police biometric database, IDENT1. An asylum decision-maker will be able to confirm the presence of a criminal offence charge. However, this information is not held in a reportable format and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost as it would require a manual trawl of case records to retrieve.