Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people applied for UK asylum while in immigration detention in 2021.

The Home Office publishes statistics on people entering, leaving and in detention in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. This data is broken down by asylum and non-asylum related detainees and are published in table Det_01 of the ‘Detention summary tables’.

“Asylum-related detainees” relates to detainees who have claimed asylum at some point, not just while in detention and also includes failed asylum seekers as well as those with open claims. The data therefore is not a direct count of people who applied for asylum while in detention.

Data on people leaving detention while their asylum claim is considered are included in the ‘Bailed (Secretary of State or SoS)’ category and are published in table Det_04a of the ‘Detention summary tables’ with the latest data being for the year ending September 2021. However, this does not specify when the asylum claim was raised.

The ‘contents’ sheet contains an overview of all available data on detention.

Figures to the end of December 2021, will be published on 24 February 2022.

Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’.