Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum seekers are there currently in the UK who would previously have been returned to the first country they arrived in under the Dublin Agreement.

Until 31 December 2020, the UK was bound by, and participated in, the EU’s Dublin arrangements for assigning EU Member State responsibility for considering asylum claims. These arrangements included use of the Eurodac fingerprint database, which assisted identifying an individual’s earlier presence in another Member State. Responsibility for claims was determined according to a referral mechanism between Member States and the application of a hierarchical criteria to the particular facts of each case.

Since the UK no longer participates in the Dublin arrangements, these specific considerations and referral mechanisms no longer operate as they did. There are therefore no statistics available to show how many people who have claimed asylum in the UK would, or could, have been identified and considered for action within Dublin were it to have continued, or how many of those we would have removed.