Tag: Stuart C. McDonald

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stuart C. McDonald on 2016-04-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the Compass asylum accommodation contract with Clearsprings Ready Home Limited for the region of London and South East England, how many faults were reported or identified from Compass inspections for each contractual pay period in 2014-15 and 2015-16; and how many such faults were not resolved within the agreed contractual timescales.

James Brokenshire

Providers are contractually required to provide safe, habitable, fit for purpose and correctly equipped accommodation to comply with the Housing Act 2004 and the Decent Homes Standard. Providers are monitored closely to ensure accommodation meets these standards and the contracts include measures to ensure any issues are quickly addressed. These performance standards are defined in the contract and are managed using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) including those which measure whether an individual property is compliant with contractual obligations following an inspection and also the number of service users effected if a fault is not repaired within the contract timescales.

The Home Office does not centrally record the number of individual faults reported or identified during accommodation inspections, or the number of individual faults not resolved within the agreed timescales. The requested information could therefore only be provided at disproportionate cost.

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:

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

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stuart C. McDonald on 2016-07-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches children and families in besieged towns in Syria.

Rory Stewart

The UK is at the forefront of the humanitarian response to the Syria crisis. We have pledged over £2.3 billion, our largest ever response to a humanitarian crisis.

The UN estimates that, of 13.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance inside Syria, 4.6 million are living in areas where humanitarian access is extremely restricted, including 592,700 people living under siege. It is unacceptable and illegal to use starvation as a weapon of war.

We are doing all we can to open up humanitarian access. We have supported the UN and international NGOs since the start of the conflict to deliver aid to UN-designated hard-to-reach and besieged areas. UK co-sponsored UN Security Council Resolutions have enabled over 300 convoys of aid to reach vulnerable people in hard-to-reach areas without the consent of the Syrian regime. We will continue to use our position in the UN Security Council and International Syria Support Group to push for unrestricted and unfettered humanitarian access, whilst maintaining the pressure for a political settlement to bring the suffering of the Syrian people to an end.