Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many children were detained while awaiting the outcome of an application for asylum in 2017-18.

Those under the age of 18 are not detained for consideration of their asylum claim.

Detention is used as an appropriate measure of immigration control and the numbers of applicants detained, who are recorded as having claimed asylum at some stage, regardless of the outcome of the claim, is available in table dt_01_q of the detention tables in the latest release of the ‘Immigration Statistics, year ending March 2018, available from the Home Office website at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/immigration-statistics-year-ending-march-2018/list-of-tables#detention