Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the correspondence of 5 April 2023 from the Children’s Commissioner to the Secretary of State entitled Statutory information request on Home Office accommodation of children seeking asylum, on how many of the variables listed in the data summary his Department holds data for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

In relation to the Children’s Commissioners correspondence, for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) who have been accommodated in hotels, the Home Office holds data on all variables outlined in the ‘data request summary’ excluding variable 8 and 23.

There were elements of the data requested which were not held in an electronically retrievable form and would have required the manual check of over 5,000 records. The Home Office were unable to provide all of the data as it would have required a high level of manual resource to obtain at a time of high operation demands. The Home Office did reach out to the Children’s Commissioners office in May 2023 to offer an alternative option to enable the commissioner to review children’s records, although this offer was turned down.