Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate her Department has made of the number of asylum seekers who have been found to have fraudulently claimed to be under the age of 18 in each of the last years.

We publish statistics on cases where the claimant’s age has been disputed and a formal age assessment has been carried out. The table below shows the number of cases in each of the last 3 years.

Data is taken from published statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/immigration-statistics-july-to-september-2015/asylum

Whilst we do hold information on the results of these assessments and whether they were found to be under the age of 18 the way corresponding data is held means that to obtain the data could only be achieved at disproportionate cost by examination of individual case files.