Speeches

Stuart C. McDonald – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stuart C. McDonald on 2016-05-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many children have been reunited with their families in the UK in (a) the last five years and (b) the last year under (i) the EU Dublin III Regulation; (ii) part 11 of the UK immigration rules, (iii) any other parts of the UK immigration rules and (iv) under exceptional circumstances.

James Brokenshire

There are several routes for children to be reunited safely with their families in the UK. Applications for family reunion for individuals under the age of 18 years of age can be received both in country and out of country and are processed by a number of casework units within the Home Office including International Operations, Settlement, Complex Casework and Asylum Operations. Unfortunately the way these applications are processed and the method used to store the data on the main immigration database means that not all of the data is recorded in a format that can be reported on automatically and would therefore require a manual investigation of thousands of case records. As a result this data could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

Since 2010 we have granted more than 21,000 family reunion visas and 175 visas for exceptional circumstances though we are not able to distinguish from the data how many of these applicants were under the age of 18. Internal Management information concerning applications from people under 18 processed by International Operations and Complex Casework are listed in the table below:

Year

Complex Casework

2010

14

2011

14

2012

8

2013

7

2014

24

2015

10

Grand Total

77

Year

International Operations

2011

2950

2012

2406

2013

2624

2014

2882

2015

3088

Grand Total

13950

This is provisional management information that is subject to change. It has not been assured to the standard of Official Statistics.