Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of irregular migrants who claim to be under 18 have undergone age assessments since 2018; and how many and what proportion of those assessed were found to be 18 or over.

The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on age disputes raised and resolved is published in table Asy_D05 of the ‘Asylum applications, initial decisions and resettlement detailed datasets’.

The latest data relates to year ending June 2024. Note that the age disputes in Asy_D05 relate to people who have claimed asylum and will include people who did not arrive in the UK irregularly.