---

Home Office: Secondment

Answer

We have a number of officials already working on migration matters in France, Greece and Italy. A number of deployments to France from the Home Office and Foreign Office are supporting joint efforts with France to ensure Dublin Regulation transfers are carried out effectively and efficiently. Our support included the secondment of a UK asylum expert to the Dublin unit in France to assist and facilitate the improvement of all stages of the process of identifying, protecting and transferring relevant cases to the UK. A team of Home Office officials are part of the joint communications programme in Calais and there are weekly meetings between the heads of the UK and French Dublin Units. There is a Home Official seconded on a bi-lateral basis to the Italian Dublin Unit and we are about to second a UK official to Greece as additional support for Dublin family transfers to the UK.

Since May we have also deployed asylum experts to support hotspots and Dublin units in both Greece and Italy under the European Asylum Support Office and as notified in my statement of 21 April, HCWS687, up to 75 UK expert personnel will be deployed to Greece to support implementation of the EU-Turkey Migration Agreement. These officials are being deployed in stages. We are considering if we need to deploy any additional resource to assist with the family reunification of children.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

40668

Session

2016-17

Grouped for answer

Yes

Subjects

Home Office France Greece Secondment Italy

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk