Undocumented Migrants: English Channel

(asked on 28th August 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to ensure that immigrants who cross the English Channel illegally return safely to their home countries.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 10th September 2020

We remain committed to removing those with no right to be in the UK, and who do not comply with our immigration laws.

The Home Office continues to work closely with EU Member State partners to enact transfers as soon as possible and ahead of the six-month timeframe for a return.

There are a number of factors that have affected returns, including the inflexibility of Dublin Regulations and last-minute legal challenges from activist lawyers, alongside practical and logistical difficulties as a result of the pandemic. We are working at pace to reduce the number of older cases in the system and increase the number of removals - and we are in active discussions with countries to make that happen.

The Home Office publishes data on the number of asylum seekers transferred under the Dublin regulation in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the number of asylum seekers transferred out of the UK under the Dublin Regulation, broken down by the EU member state they have been transferred to are published in tables Dub_D01 of the asylum and resettlement detailed datasets. Information on how to use the dataset can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbook. The latest data relates to the year ending December 2019.

Please note, that we do not publish the breakdowns of the nationality of those being transferred under the Dublin Regulation

Additionally, the Home Office publishes a high-level overview of the data in the ‘summary tables’. The ‘contents’ sheet contains an overview of all available data on asylum and resettlement.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release

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