Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what each response was from those local authorities which replied to her letter of September 2016 requesting confirmation of how many unaccompanied asylum-seeking children they could accommodate.

I wrote to local authorities on 8 September last year asking them to confirm via their Strategic Migration Partnership the number of unaccompanied children who could be placed in their local authority area. We received a range of responses from Strategic Migration Partnerships but also from local authorities directly. Based on those responses and our extensive consultation over the summer we calculated they had capacity for an additional 400 unaccompanied asylum seeking children until the end of the 2016/17 financial year. This is in addition to the many unaccompanied children already in local authority care. We estimate that at least 50 of the family reunion cases will require a local authority placement in circumstances where the reunion does not work out.