Louise Haigh – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Louise Haigh on 2016-02-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the correction of 9 February 2016 to Question 13206, what the cause was of the error in information on former unaccompanied minors removed between 2007 and 31 December 2015; and what steps she is taking to ensure that correct information is collected and published in future.

James Brokenshire

The mistake given in the original response to Question 13206 resulted from two errors in the query for extracting information from the relevant database. One error involved the use of an incorrect definition which excluded former unaccompanied asylum seeking children who now had linked dependants. The other was an error in the computer code which extracted the data. In this instance, the code for the query was mistyped and so the data returned was incorrect. These errors have now been resolved and a correction issued. Such mistakes are rare and when they occur they are taken very seriously.

It is regrettable that human error caused the original response to this Parliamentary Question to be incorrect and improvements have been put in place. The appropriate definition has been reviewed and confirmed. This definition, and the correct approach on careful coding, have been made clear to the officials involved. We are reviewing other Parliamentary Answers about unaccompanied asylum seeking children to see if these were affected by similar issues. While these respond to different specific questions, we wish to review the methodology used thoroughly. We are also reviewing whether additional processes are needed for Parliamentary Questions that require complex data queries.