Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many migrants have arrived in the UK illegally in each month of the last three years.

The Home Office does not publish data on the number of individuals who have arrived illegally in the UK. By its very nature, it is not possible to know the exact size of the illegal population, or the numbers who successfully enter the UK illegally, and so we do not seek to make any official estimates of the illegal population.

Keeping our border secure is the Government’s highest priority and we are focused on making it harder for people to enter and live in the UK illegally whilst ensuring those who have the right to reside in the UK can do so.

Foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them and while legal challenges and problems obtaining travel documents can frustrate immediate deportation, we never give up trying to deport FNOs and making our communities safer or seek to return people who do not have any legal right to stay in the UK.

The Home Office publishes data on the number of returns from the UK in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the number of Returns (of which deportations are a subset) are published in table Ret_D01 of the Returns detailed datasets.

The term 'deportations' refers to a legally-defined subset of returns which are enforced either following a criminal conviction or when it is judged that a person’s removal from the UK is conducive to the public good. Information on those deported is not separately available and therefore the published statistics refer to all enforced returns.

Please note that only some of those returned will have previously entered the UK illegally; others may have entered legally, for example those who enter on a visa and overstay their period of valid leave and are therefore not separately identifiable in the data.