Refugees and asylum seekers

Applications for asylum

Asylum seekers are people who have changed their country of ‘usual residence’ from fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, social group or political opinion.

The Home Office publishes statistics on the number of asylum applicants and the decisions taken on those applications as part of their quarterly immigration statistics series.

Monthly figures on the number of asylum applications are also available separately from the Home Office.

The numbers of applications that go to appeal are published in the Ministry of Justice’s tribunals statistics.

Who asylum seekers are and where they come from

More detailed data on asylum seekers (with breakdowns by age, sex and country of origin) is published as part of the Home Office’s control of immigration series. However, these figures are increasingly out of date. More recent figures are published in the Home Office’s general immigration statistics release, which is issued every three months.

International comparisons

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) compiles statistics on asylum levels and trends in most major countries.