Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Williams of Trafford on 29 November 2016 (HL2733), why they will not be publishing the religious and ethnic breakdown of those resettled under the Syrian vulnerable person resettlement programme.

The refugees that we are bringing to the United Kingdom are very vulnerable people. Our prime concern is their safety and protection as they arrive in this country. We believe that one way to protect their privacy and ensure their recovery and integration is to limit the amount of information about them that we make publicly available.

In resettlement the UK works according to the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality- which means that we do not take into consideration the ethno-religious origins of people requiring assistance as we resettle solely on the basis of needs, identified by UNHCR. We therefore do not believe it is appropriate to publish a religious and ethnic breakdown of those who have been resettled.

Notwithstanding this the Home Office is committed to publishing data on arrivals in an orderly way as part of the regular quarterly Immigration Statistics, in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.