Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what data her Department collects on the religious affiliations of asylum seekers.

The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on asylum applications can be found in table Asy_D01 of the ‘asylum and resettlement detailed datasets’.

The Home Office does not publish asylum applicants by religion. Whilst we hold information regarding the religion of asylum claimants, this information could only be obtained at disproportionate cost as it would require a manual trawl of case records to retrieve.

A claimant’s religion will be established during the asylum registration process. Depending on the nature of the claim, further information regarding a claimant’s religion may be requested during a substantive asylum interview.

For further information, please see: Screening and routing.docx (publishing.service.gov.uk) and Asylum interview.docx (publishing.service.gov.uk)