PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Asylum: Children (6 June 2016)

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many unaccompanied children arrived in the UK and claimed asylum (a) for each country of origin, (b) by each commercial company who provided transport if known, (c) at each port and (d) in total in each of the last seven years.

Asked by:
Gareth Thomas (Labour)

Figures on asylum claims for Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC) are published quarterly by the Home Office in the Immigration Statistics release. The attached table shows the total number of claims for asylum from Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children, excluding dependants, in the last seven years.

Year	Total claims
2009	2,857
2010	1,515
2011	1,248
2012	1,125
2013	1,265
2014	1,945
2015	3,043

Notes

(1) Data for 2015 are provisional and subject to change.

(2) An Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Child (UASC) is a person under 18, or who, in the absence of documentary evidence establishing age, appears to be under that age, is applying for asylum on his or her own right and has no relative or guardian in the United Kingdom.

(3) Source: table as_08, Immigration Statistics January to March 2016, Home Office

Annual figures on the number of claims for asylum from Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children by country of nationality are available in table as_08 in volume 3 of the asylum data tables: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/525627/asylum3-q1-2016-tabs.ods.

A copy of the latest release, Immigration Statistics January to March 2016, is available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statistics-january-to-march-2016.

The information requested to answer parts (b) and (c) of the question is not centrally and systematically recorded and to provide this information would require the manual investigation of thousands of case files at a disproportionate cost.

Answered by:
James Brokenshire (Conservative)
13 June 2016