Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 5 February 2025 to Question 902576 on Employment: Asylum, what the gender balance of dependents of asylum seekers is; what assessment she has made of the impact of the rules that do not allow those dependants to work on the Government’s (a) aim to deliver an asylum process that is gender sensitive and (b) wider strategy to tackle violence against women and girls.

We are committed to delivering an asylum process that is gender sensitive, building on the Government’s wider strategy to tackle violence against women and girls. All decision-makers receive mandatory training on considering asylum claims and must follow published Home Office policy guidance, including guidance on gender issues, which covers specific forms of gender-based persecution.

The Home Office also continues to invest in a programme of transformation to speed up decision making and therefore reduce the time people spend in the asylum system. This approach will ensure that genuine asylum seekers can be accepted quickly and gain access to the labour market, and those who are not can be removed to their home country.

The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on asylum claims by applicant type and sex is published in table Asy_D01 of the ‘Asylum applications, initial decisions and resettlement detailed datasets’. The latest data relates to the year ending September 2024.