Immigration and asylum is the single largest FOI topic we track — here's what's actually in it

Of everything we track in this tracker, no subject comes close to immigration and asylum. It accounts for 153 of the FOI releases in our policing & justice dataset — more than four times the next largest topic (prisons and probation, at 39). 148 of those 153 come from a single department: the Home Office, either directly or through its sub-bodies UK Visas and Immigration and Immigration Enforcement.

What people actually ask about

The releases span two decades, and the pattern in what's being asked is fairly consistent: a lot of it is process and volume questions rather than policy debate. How many visa applications of a given type were processed in a given period. How long applications took. How many people were removed, and to where. How many unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were supported in a particular local authority area. Requests broken down by nationality show up constantly — Tier 1 entrepreneur and investor visas, spouse settlement visas processed in specific overseas posts, asylum applications from specific countries.

A recurring, more pointed theme across the whole period is conditions in detention: incidents of self-harm in immigration removal centres appear repeatedly from 2007 through 2015, asked in almost identical terms by what look like different requesters each time. That kind of repetition is itself informative — it suggests sustained public and journalistic interest in a subject the department doesn't proactively publish ongoing figures on, so the same question gets re-asked every year or two.

The volume has grown, not shrunk

Across the full tracked period, request volume in this topic has risen rather than fallen — see the trend chart on the topic page itself. That's worth noting because it cuts against a common assumption that FOI activity tends to fade over time as departments publish more proactively. Immigration and asylum appears to be the opposite: a subject where demand for granular, ad-hoc detail keeps outpacing what's already public.

Why this is almost entirely one department

It's worth being explicit about why the organisation list here is so short. GOV.UK's FOI release feed is a central government channel — it's where the Home Office publishes, not where every public body dealing with immigration does. Local authorities handling asylum dispersal, or the tribunals hearing appeals, don't show up here at all. So "immigration and asylum FOI" on this site really means "what the Home Office and its enforcement arms are asked and how they answer" — a real and substantial slice of the picture, but not the whole of it. See our methodology for more on what GOV.UK's feed does and doesn't cover.