Refugees and children in homelessness: FOI release

Information requested

You asked for:

“In the years 2018-2019, how many refugees were allowed into / settled in Scotland, and for the same time period, how many children were classed as being homeless, and if possible, what were the nationalities and / or ethnicities of those children (however, the number of children alone is acceptable).”

Response

Asylum and immigration are matters reserved to the UK Government and handled by the Home Office. This includes refugee resettlement. The UK Government regularly publishes asylum and immigration statistics, and data on refugee resettlement is available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release.

Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, you may wish to contact the Home Office at MigrationStatsEnquiries@homeoffice.gov.uk requesting this information in a different format.

I enclose a copy of the information you requested related to children and homelessness at Annex A.

Annex A

Data about homeless applications in Scotland is captured through the HL1 homelessness data collection. This collection captures information about the ethnicity of the main applicant in an applicant household (as well as for their partner, if applicable). It does not however capture this information for children in the household directly. The data collection does not gather data about nationality.

The following table gives the number of children in households assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness in 2018/19, broken down by the ethnic group of the main applicant.

Note that there may be occasions where the ethnicity of any children in the applicant household is not the same as that of the main applicant. This might occur for example when the household has formed from a relationship in which the partner of the main applicant has children from a previous relationship.

Ethnic group of the main homeless applicant	All children in households assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness
White: Scottish	11320
White: Other British	945
White: Irish	65
White: Other	450
Black: African	205
Black: Caribbean	10
Black: Other	25
Asian: Indian	50
Asian: Pakistani	205
Asian: Bangladeshi	55
Asian: Chinese	30
Asian: Other	65
Mixed	60
Other	1015
Not Known	490
Refused	85
Gypsy/Traveller	45
Polish	275
Other African	35
Black, Black Scottish or Black British	65
Arab, Arab Scottish or Arab British	165
All	15660

For disclosure purposes, figures in the table are rounded to the nearest 5, apart from 1,2 and 3, which are rounded to '<4'.

About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.