Asylum: Mental Health
(asked on 23rd January 2019) - View Source
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum applications are pending where the claimant has a recorded mental health condition; and how many of these are claims have been awaiting decision for (a) three years (b) two years and (c) 12 months.
The Department does not hold data on the number of asylum seekers who have mental health issues and have been waiting a decision for two years, three years and 12 months in a reportable format.
The basis of a person’s asylum claim and any personal information is recorded on their individual Home Office file, but not in a way that can be easi-ly aggregated, so this information could only be obtained at disproportionate cost, because it would require a manual search through individual records. Even then, the data may not be sufficiently reliable, as it is worth noting that the claimants do not always disclose their mental health issues to case-workers despite having opportunity to do so.
The Home Office publishes data, in its quarterly Immigration Statistics release, on the number of asylum applications lodged in each year, broken down by outcome, including cases with a decision, or appeal outcome, or not known, as at May 2018 (time of publication), in table as_06 (Asylum, volume 2).
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