Mike Kane – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Mike Kane on 2016-03-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what mechanisms her Department has in place to determine the geographic distribution of asylum seekers awaiting decisions on asylum applications.

Mike Penning

The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 introduced the policy of national dispersal, designed to share the impact of asylum seekers across the whole of the UK. Asylum seekers are housed across the UK under voluntary agreements between national government and local authorities that have been in place since 2000.

We work to a maximum agreed dispersal ratio of 1:200 asylum seekers per head of total population. We are proactively engaging with all areas that to date have not participated in asylum dispersal with a view to negotiating voluntary agreements to do so.