Alistair Carmichael – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Alistair Carmichael on 2015-11-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many Syrian refugees arrived in the UK through the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation scheme in October 2015.

Richard Harrington

The refugees that we are bringing to the United Kingdom are very vulnerable people. Our prime concern is their safety and protection as they arrive in this country. We believe that one way to protect their privacy and ensure their recovery and integration is to limit the amount of information about them that we make publicly available. We want to ensure the understandable public interest in the scheme is not based on a running commentary on the numbers that have arrived.

Notwithstanding this the Home Office is committed to publishing data in an orderly way as part of the regular quarterly Immigration Statistics, in line with the Code of Practice for Of-ficial Statistics. The next set of figures will be in the quarterly release on 26 November 2015 and will cover the period July-September 2015. These numbers will be updated each quarter.