To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of foreign national prisoners made a claim for asylum prior to being detained in the latest year for which data is available.
Answered on
10 January 2024
The Home Office does not publish data on the immigration status of foreign nationals held in prisons.
The Home Office publishes data on asylum-related detainees in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on numbers of asylum-related detainees entering, leaving and in detention are published in table Det_01 of the ‘Detention Summary tables’. However data on numbers of foreign national offenders being detained are not published. 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 returned 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. The latest data relates to the end of September 2023 for entering and leaving detention data, and September 2022 for in detention data.
Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’.