Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to encourage the participation of local authorities in the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme.

Local authority participation in refugee resettlement is voluntary. We are grateful to those who have welcomed refugees into their communities, arranging accommodation and supporting their integration under this and other schemes to date, and will continue to work closely with local authorities and Strategic Migration Partnerships to encourage participation and convert pledges into resettlement places for refugees.

The Home Office publishes the number of resettlements under the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme as part of the Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release. A quarterly breakdown of this scheme’s resettlements by local authority is also available from October 2015 onwards. This data can be found in the Asylum data tables volume 4 on sheets as19q and as20q.