Bradford has the highest number of asylum seekers in the whole of the Yorkshire and Humberside area, according to new Home Office figures.

At the end of July, 1,621 asylum seekers and their dependants were in National Asylum Support Service accommodation in the Bradford district.

The figures - from the inter-agency co-ordination team of the Refugee Council, based at the Home Office - also reveal that in the three months from July, 282 asylum seekers arrived in the district.

This brings the total number of new arrivals for the year to 1,224.

The information is contained in a report to go before a meeting of North Bradford Primary Care Trust board on Wednesday.

It reveals that the majority of asylum seekers - 926 - are housed within inner-city Bradford. Just 80 are located within North Bradford, with a further 44 in Airedale and 173 in the district covered by Bradford South and West PCT.

The report, by Dr Shirley Brierley, public health registrar and chairman of the steering group for the health of asylum seekers, said: "Asylum seekers continue to come from many different countries. In the last three months the most common countries of origin were the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Iraq, followed by smaller numbers from Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Poland."

A Bradford Council spokesman said 197 council properties in the district are set aside for asylum seekers.

Jim Johnson, project co-ordinator for Bradford Action for Refugees, said: "Throughout Eastern Europe, which includes Slovakia and Romania, the Roma population is undergoing severe persecution from gangs of people attacking them - I suppose this is why we are seeing more people from Eastern Europe."

He said the driving force behind the dispersal of asylum seekers was the availability of accommodation in a district, as well as the ethnic mix of the host town or city. "It would not be appropriate to send a large number of people to a city where they would feel totally excluded because of their ethnic mix," he said.

He said there was a limit to the numbers that Bradford could accommodate both in local authority housing and in private rented homes.