Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much compensation her Department has paid for unlawfully detaining individuals under immigration powers in each of the last five years.

The amounts paid by the Home Office in compensation following claims for unlawful detention were as follows:

2011-12 £4.5 million
2012-13 £5.0 million
2013-14 £4.8 million

It is not possible to provide similar information for earlier periods, as data are not held in the appropriate format and to extract them would incur disproportionate cost.