Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have travelled to the UK from Afghanistan every month not through official schemes since the (a) Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and (b) Afghan citizens resettlement schemes opened.

The Home Office publishes statistics on detected irregular arrivals to the UK in the ‘Irregular Migration to the UK statistics’ release. Data on detected irregular arrivals, by method of entry and nationality, is published in table Irr_D01 of the ‘Irregular migration to the UK detailed dataset’ with the latest data up to the end of June 2023.

These figures included detected irregular arrivals only, not those arriving on any regular routes. These statistics also should not be used to infer the size of the irregular population in the UK, nor the total number of people entering the UK irregularly. For a number of reasons, it is not possible to know the exact size of the irregular population, or the number entering irregularly, and so we have not produced any official estimates for this number.

The Home Office also publishes provisional data on small boat arrivals in the ‘Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Act’ release. Data on migrants detected crossing the English Channel in small boats, by nationality, can be found in table IMB_01b of the ‘Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Act: data tables to August 2023’. The latest data relate to 31 July 2023.