Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK from France have been returned to France in each of the last five years for which figures are available.

The UK has a proud history of providing protection to those who need it, in accordance with our international obligations under the Refugee Convention and European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Those found not to need protection are refused and if unsuccessful at a subsequent appeal will be removed from the UK and it is an established principle that those seeking asylum should claim it in the first safe country they reach.

The Home Office publishes data on the number of returns from the UK and Dublin regulation in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release However, the data do not show which of these have previously arrived from France.

Data on:

1) The number of Returns to country of destination are published in table Ret_D02 of the Returns detailed datasets, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/returns-and-detention-datasets

2) The number of individuals who have been transferred to an EU member state are published in table Dub_D01 of the Dublin regulation datasets. This data is published annually and includes data dating back to 2015. Please note that this shows the country where the individual has been transferred to and not necessarily the nationality of the individual.

Information on how to use the dataset can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbook. The latest data relates to the year ending December 2019.

Additionally, the Home Office publishes a high-level overview of the returns data in the Summary Returns tables and the asylum data in the ‘ Summary Asylum tables’. The ‘contents’ sheet contains an overview of all available data on returns, asylum and resettlement.