Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the UK's performance in hosting (1) refugees, and (2) migrants, compared to other Council of Europe member states, particularly with reference to (a) education, (b) apprenticeships, (c) employment, and (d) levels of integration.

The UK has a long history of supporting refugees in need of protection. Our resettlement schemes have provided safe and legal routes for tens of thousands of people to start new lives in the UK.

The UK is a global leader in resettlement. Since 2015, we have resettled more than 200,000 people through safe and legal routes direct from regions of conflict and instability.

Additionally, data collected from UNHCR from 2017-2021 shows the UK has resettled the 4th largest number of refugees worldwide. And when compared to the EU, has resettled the second highest number of refugees (c.20,000 people over that period, behind Sweden which resettled c.22,000).

The Home Office publishes data on refugees and other migrants in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’, including international asylum comparisons in the chapter ‘How many people do we grant asylum or protection to?’. The ‘List of tables’ shows all the latest data tables available from the release. The latest data relates to March 2022. Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’.

The Home Office published an ‘Indicators of Integration framework’ in 2019, which provides a framework to support local and national practitioners in developing strategies and in measuring progress in the integration of refugees and other groups.

The Indicators of Integration framework has underpinned our approach to evaluating the VPRS and VCRS refugee resettlement schemes, which involved quantitative and qualitative research, and we are now working with the Office of National Statistics to explore longer-term integration outcomes for refugees via administrative data collected by other government departments.

With the closure of VPRS and VCRS to new arrivals in February 2021, and the subsequent launch of new schemes (UKRS, ACRS and ARAP), we are building on our previous evaluation to develop an approach to evaluating ongoing refugee resettlement, which we expect to publish later this year.