§ Baroness Blatchasked Her Majesty's Government:
How many asylum seekers were accommodated at the Oakington Centre on each day of January. [HL1664]
§ Lord FilkinIn order to maximise the impact of the non-suspensive appeal provisions, Oakington took, from 7 November 2002, only claimants from the 10 EU accession states (Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia. Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia) listed as safe in the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. Claims from these countries will be refused and certified as clearly unfounded, generating a non-suspensive appeal (NSA) right, unless my right honourable friend the Home Secretary is satisfied they are not. In these cases, applicants are detained at Oakington for their decision and until removal, unless it is judged necessary to transfer them to secure detention. The daily intake at Oakington was then dependent upon claims from persons entitled to reside in these 10 countries and the impact on this daily intake of this new process was obviously not possible to predict. In fact, the process had an immediate and significant impact: numbers dropped significantly in December 2002 and were low in early January 2003.
As a result, from 12 January 2003, Oakington has resumed intake from the list of 40 previous nationalities from the Oakington-suitable list. This has enabled us to make best use of Oakington while retaining the flexibility to give absolute priority to the 10 nationalities at present covered by the NSA process, which is to be extended to include the further seven nationalities recently announced.
81WAFigures for occupancy at Oakington are normally published on a quarterly basis and those for January are not yet available in publishable form. However, at 31 January 2003, locally-held management information shows there to have been 116 detained at the centre on that day.