Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many LGBTQI+ people are in immigration detention in the UK.

The management of and support for detained individuals that identify as LGBTQI+ is set out in published guidance. Detention Services Order 2/2016 ‘Lesbian, gay and bisexual detainees in the detention estate’, and Detention Services Order 11/2012 ‘Care and Management of Transsexual Detainees’. Each set out how individuals with these particular protected characteristics should be safeguarded and treated in detention.

The Home Office does not hold central data on the number of LGBTQI+ residents in immigration detention. It is not incumbent upon a detained individual to declare their sexuality. Consequently, even a manual trawl of cases will not necessarily be representative of the true number of LGBTQI individuals detained during any period.

The Home Office does however publish statistics on people in immigration detention in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release(opens in a new tab)’. The number of people in detention at the end of each quarter are in table Det_D02 of the ‘Detention detailed datasets(opens in a new tab)’, where the data can be broken down by current place of detention. The latest data relate to as at the end of December 2022.

Data as at the end of March 2023 is scheduled to be published in late May 2023.