Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many unaccompanied asylum seeking children were detained in the UK in 2019.

Unaccompanied children are not detained for consideration of their asylum claim.

On occasion, new information may come to light or new concerns raised, indicating a person who has been detained as an adult may be a child. In such circumstances we would seek to release them into the care of local authority children’s services at the earliest safe opportunity for an age assessment.

Information on the number of occurrences of people leaving detention by nationality, age, sex, reason for leaving detention and length of detention can be found in table Det_D03 of the detention data tables, which can be found in the latest release of ‘Immigration Statistics’, available from GOV.UK at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/returns-and-detention-datasets. The figures do not distinguish between accompanied and unaccompanied children.