Keith Vaz – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Keith Vaz on 2014-06-04.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many marriages were reported to the Home Office as suspicious or sham in each year since 2009.

Karen Bradley

Sections 24 and 24A of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 place a duty on
registration officers to submit a report to the Home Office where they have
reasonable grounds to suspect that a marriage or civil partnership is a sham
being entered into for immigration purposes. Table 1 shows the
number of section 24/24A reports received in each year since 2009. Same sex
marriages only came into effect this year there is therefore no data relating
to this period, or for civil partnerships before 2011.

The Home Office Intelligence Management System (IMS) records allegations from
the public regarding immigration-related offences. Since 30 September 2012 we
have recorded the following numbers of reports relating to sham marriage as set
out in Table 2.
These figures relate to reports identified by the public as possible sham
marriage.

Table 1

Year	Number of section 24/24A reports	Of which refer civil partnerships
2009	561
2010	934
2011	1,741	28
2012	1,891	28
2013	2135	25

Table 2

Year	Number of reports relating to sham marriage recorded on IMS
2012 (from 30 September)	984
2013	6909