Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department will take to facilitate child refugees being reunited with parents living in the UK after the UK leaves the EU.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
The Government remains resolutely committed to the principle of family reunion.
When the UK leaves the EU, we will cease to participate in EU instruments at the end of the transition period, including the Dublin Regulation. This means that the ability of unaccompanied children under Dublin to reunite with family will end, unless a replacement agreement is negotiated. The Government has been clear that it is committed to seeking such an agreement with the EU, thereby ensuring these children can continue to reunite with family once we are out of Dublin. The Home Secretary wrote to the European Commission on 22 October to begin negotiations.
The UK will continue to be bound by the Dublin Regulation provisions during the transition period, allowing us to continue to transfer family reunion cases to the UK throughout 2020, and we will continue to process all family reunion requests that have been submitted but not completed under Dublin before the end of the transition period.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people received (a) police cautions and (b) criminal records for offences relating to cannabis in each of the last 10 years.
Answered by Kit Malthouse
The Ministry of Justice publishes official statistics on the number of police cautions and court convictions issued for possession of cannabis offences. Data for the period 2008 and 2018 can be found here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2018
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many sites have been identified in addition to operational immigration detention centres for the administrative detention of (a) foreign nationals under immigration powers and (b) British nationals under emergency powers as part of her Department's contingency plans for the UK leaving the EU without a deal; and what the (a) addresses are and (b) estimated capacity is of each site.
Answered by Seema Kennedy
The Department has no such plans.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people from Afghanistan who claimed asylum in the UK were returned to that country during the period when coalition forces were active there.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The number of returns from the UK of nationals of Afghanistan to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2018 is published in table rt_04 (returns data tables, volume 4) in ‘Immigration Statistics, year ending March 2019’, available from the GOV.uk website at:
Information on returns prior to 2004 is not comparable with more recent years; however data on the number of enforced removals and voluntary returns for the period 2000 to 2003 can be obtained from the National Archives under the title Control of Immigration: Statistics, United Kingdom.
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many Afghanistani interpreters who worked for (a) British forces and (b) NATO forces during the Afghanistan conflict have been granted asylum in the UK.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The Home Office are unable to report on how many Afghanistani interpreters who worked for (a) British Forces and (b) NATO forces during the Afghanistan conflict, have been granted asylum in the UK. This information is recorded on individual Home Office files, but not in a way that can be easily retrieved, and this information could only be obtained at disproportionate costs.
The Home Office does publish data on those who have been granted asylum in the UK, for main applicants broken down by country of nationality, including those from Afghanistan. The latest release published 24th May 2019, can be found in tab as_01 at volume 1 of the quarterly Immigration Statistics release:
Asked by: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many officials in his Department have been seconded away from their normal duties to work on the UK's withdrawal from the EU; and what effect that secondment of staff has had on the effectiveness of his Department.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
The department has been continually assessing the resourcing levels required to prepare for EU Exit across all possible scenarios, developing contingency plans in line with government policy. It is not possible to provide the number of staff who have been moved from normal duties. This is because staff are generally engaged across a range of workstreams, which will include business as usual activity as well as EU Exit preparations, across all scenarios.
To release existing capacity on to specialist roles to support the UK’s exit from the EU in an orderly manner, the Home Office took a number of reprioritisation choices in early 2019 to release capacity on to critical EU Exit roles. This was undertaken as part of a cross-government reprioritisation exercise.
As a general principle, reprioritisation decisions within the Home Office focussed on areas of its domestic work which could be scaled back or slowed, thus alleviating the need to halt these areas of work in their entirety whilst fulfilling the need to release the required numbers of specialist resource on to critical EU Exit roles.
To minimise the overall demand for internal reprioritisation, the Home Office also sought to secure resource through the Cabinet Office clearing hub, a government-wide initiative set up to meet the demands of EU Exit through cross-departmental redeployment of resource across policy and operational delivery roles.