Hilary Benn – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Hilary Benn on 2015-11-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been identified for resettlement in the UK as part of the vulnerable Syrian refugee resettlement programme since 20 September 2015.

Richard Harrington

UNHCR identifies and proposes Syrian refugees for the VPR scheme from among the whole of the registered refugee population in the region, over 4 million people. This includes people in formal refugee camps, informal settlements and host communities. Approximately 430,000 registered refugees meet UNHCR’s vulnerability criteria.

We will not be giving a running commentary on how many people have been identified for resettlement in the UK. Not all referrals translate into arrivals for a variety of reasons. We therefore do not consider it would be appropriate to provide this figure.

Notwithstanding this the Home Office is committed to publishing data on arrivals through the resettlement programme in an orderly way as part of the regular quarterly Immigration Statistics, in line with the Code of Practice for Official 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.