Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the Conclusions of the European Council of 25 and 26 June 2015 paragraph 4(e), whether the UK is legally bound by the agreement to participate in resettling 20,000 displaced persons.

The European Commission proposal on resettlement is in the form of a Recommendation and is therefore not legally binding on Member States.

Her Majesty's Government has been very clear that resettlement of refugees is a matter for national governments, not the EU. We will not participate in any EU proposals for mandatory resettlement. But we will continue to decide and run our own national schemes as part of our wider asylum and migration policy and the EU proposals on resettlement explicitly recognise this. We expect to resettle up to 2,200 refugees over the next two years under our existing national schemes.