Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many people were held in immigration detention in the UK at the start of each of the last five financial years; how many were compulsorily deported in each year; and what proportion of deportations were of (1) people at the end of court sentences, and (2) unsuccessful asylum claimants.

The Home Office publishes data on people in detention in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the number of people in detention on the last day of each quarter are published in table Det_D02. Data on people leaving detention every quarter by reason for leaving (including whether they were returned from the UK) are published in Det_D03 of the Detailed Detention 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. 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 detention.

Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’. Q1 2020 figures will be released on 21^st May 2020.

The term 'deportations' refers to a legally-defined subset of returns which are enforced either following a criminal conviction or when it is judged that a person’s removal from the UK is conducive to the public good. Information on those deported is not separately available and therefore the ‘returned from the UK’ category in the leaving detention by reason figures, refer to all enforced returns and voluntary departures.