Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people were detained for attempting to enter Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland illegally in each of the past five years.

As part of the Common Travel Area (CTA) arrangements, the UK does not operate routine immigration controls on journeys from Ireland to the UK, with no immigration checks being undertaken on the Ireland-Northern Ireland land border.

The UK does however carry out intelligence-led operations to target potential abuse of CTA routes, including between Ireland and Northern Ireland but away from the land border. This is to detect those who intend to abuse CTA arrangements. Operational activity is intelligence led and focussed on abuse of the CTA by criminals.

There is a high level of cooperation between multiple law enforcement agencies, including Border Force, Immigration Enforcement, NCA and Police forces to achieve this. We regularly monitor and review any identified trends and we work closely with our colleagues in Ireland in taking action to address this.