Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many asylum seekers were detained on (1) 30 April, and (2) the same day in each of the previous three months.

The Home Office publishes statistics on people in detention in the 'Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release', which can be found on Gov.uk. The number of people in detention at the end of each year is broken down by asylum and non-asylum in table Det_01, of the ‘Detention summary tables’, which can also be found attached. The latest data goes up to the end of December 2021. Data for January to March 2022 will be published on the 26 May 2022.

Asylum-related cases refer to those where there has been an asylum claim at some stage prior or during detention. This will include asylum seekers whose asylum claims have been refused, and who have exhausted any rights of appeal, those retuned under third country provisions, as well as those granted asylum/protection, but detained for other reasons (such as criminality).

Information on how to use the dataset can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbook.