Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help reduce (a) suicide and (b) deaths amongst young asylum seekers.

Answered by Preet Kaur Gill

The Government is determined to address the unacceptably high number of early deaths among care experienced young people, including unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and care leavers, who can be among the most vulnerable in society due to their experiences. Last month, a review into care leaver deaths was launched, and deaths of young people who were unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are being considered as part of this work. Findings from the review will be shared later this year and will inform improvements to the support provided to care experienced young people across all aspects of their lives.

The Government continues to work across health, safeguarding, and asylum systems to ensure access to appropriate mental health and wellbeing support.

More broadly, the Government is committed to reducing the number of lives lost to suicide. The Suicide Prevention Strategy for England 2023 to 2028 sets out a cross-Government approach to suicide prevention and identifies children and young people as a priority group for tailored and targeted action at a national level.

The strategy includes a commitment to improve understanding of suicide risk and trends among particular groups, including refugees, asylum seekers, and ethnic minority groups.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Answer of 4 December 2024 to Question 16565 on Suicide: Asylum and Refugees, whether the near to real time suspected suicide surveillance system was expanded to include intelligence on refugees and asylum seekers.

Answered by Preet Kaur Gill

The Department and the police are working together to expand the data used in the near to Real Time Suspected Suicide Surveillance system in a way that has a wider purpose but includes the potential to improve intelligence on refugees and asylum seekers. This change to the data set is being actively pursued but is not yet in place.

Separately, the current dataset includes a ‘other information’ field that includes a refugees and asylum seekers option. Due to data completeness this field is not used within current routine reporting. There is ongoing work to improve overall data quality and completeness of this data set, and this can lead to more fields being used for reporting. However, there is no specific timeframe to expect reporting on asylum seekers and refugees through this route.

Found: present at the time of the meeting described the police response as “ridiculously heavy-handed” and Carla Denyer