Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, on what basis her Department determines the number of asylum seekers housed within each parliamentary constituency.
Asylum seekers are housed across the UK under agreements made between national government and local authorities, rather than constituencies, that have been in place since the introduction of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999.
The amount of asylum seekers accommodated in each local authority area is limited to 0.5% of the 2011 census population or, a ratio of 1:200 of supported asylum seekers to overall population of the area. The majority of local authorities who accommodate asylum seekers are not in close proximity to this limit. We would not normally go beyond that ratio without the agreement of the relevant local authority.