FOI reference: FOI-2025-2666
You asked
Please provide the following;
The total number of non-English speaking individuals living in the UK.
How many of these non-English speaking individuals are claiming benefits?
The total number of Muslims living in the UK.
The total number of Christians living in the UK.
How many people in the UK are currently claiming benefits, broken down by:
- Christian
- Muslim
The current total population of the UK at the time of answering.
From 2020 to the present, broken down by year, how many illegal immigrants have arrived in the UK.
The percentage of the UK population that speaks English as their first language.
The total number of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK.
How many Muslims in the UK have citizenship, and how many are permanent residents or on temporary visas?
The total number of people in the UK receiving housing benefits broken down by:
- Christians
- Muslims
We said
Thank you for your freedom of information request.
The associated download provides Census 2021 datasets detailing population, proficiency in English, religion, main language and economic activity by religion for England and Wales.
We do not hold any information on the religion of people claiming benefit, but the economic activity table shows those that are unemployed or long-term sick or disabled. However, we can’t be sure if they are claiming any benefits.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) does not collect the religion of people with temporary visas. The religion dataset provided is of all usual residents. A usual resident is anyone who on Census Day, 21 March 2021, was in the UK and had stayed or intended to stay in the UK for a period of 12 months or more or had a permanent UK address and was outside the UK and intended to be outside the UK for less than 12 months.
These datasets have been downloaded from nomis. Nomis is a service run on behalf of the ONS by the University of Durham publishing statistics related to population, society and the labour market at national, regional and local levels, including data from current and previous censuses. Data is freely available. Alternatively, you can obtain census data from our create a custom dataset tool.
We do not hold any data on illegal immigrants but the Home Office has released Irregular migration to the UK, year ending June 2024 which you may find useful.
The Home Office may be able to provide statistics relating to asylum seekers and refugees. An asylum applicant (also referred to as "asylum seeker") is someone who makes a claim to be recognised as a refugee under the Refugee Convention.
"Asylum" estimates in this bulletin refer to the long-term international migration of non-EU+ nationals who have applied (that is, made a claim) for asylum in the UK within a year of arrival. It includes people who claimed asylum after arriving in the UK via a regular route and those who claimed after arriving irregularly, for example, via small boats.
An asylum-related return is one where there has been an asylum claim at some stage prior to the return. For more information on this, see the User Guide to Home Office Immigration Statistics.
Please contact pop.info@ons.gov.uk if you have any further queries.