PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Prisoners' Transfers: Foreign Nationals (9 September 2020)

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many foreign national offenders convicted of human trafficking or modern slavery offences were returned to their country of origin under (a) the Early Removal Scheme, (b) an EU Prisoner Transfer Framework Decision, (c) the Additional Protocol to the Council of Europe Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons and (d) bilateral prisoner transfer agreements in each year from 2016 to 2019; and under each scheme how many returned offenders were EEA or Swiss nationals in each of those years.

Asked by:
Dame Karen Bradley (Conservative)

We continue to remove foreign national offenders where routes are available.

Since 2010, we have removed over 55,000 foreign national offenders from our prisons, immigration removal centres and the community, with 4,743 removed in 2019/20.

We are absolutely committed to removing foreign national offenders from the UK and continue to work closely with international governments to maximise the removal of serious and persistent offenders.

We are constantly reviewing progress to ensure that all options are being pursued and that our early removal mechanisms are working as effectively as possible.

The latest published information on foreign national offenders returned under the Early Removal and Facilitated Returns Schemes is available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/immigration-enforcement-data-august-2020 (Table FNO_09 in Transparency data Immigration Enforcement data: August 2020, provides the numbers of foreign nationals removed under the Early Removal Scheme every year since 2010 but that there is no published data that breaks down these numbers by nationality or offence type).

	FNOs repatriated under EUPTFD convicted of human trafficking or modern slavery offences	FNOs repatriated under CoE Convention convicted of human trafficking or modern slavery offences	FNOs repatriated under bilateral PTAs convicted of human trafficking or modern slavery offences
2016	2	0	0
2017	0	0	0
2018	1	0	0
2019	2	0	0

All five prisoners repatriated under the EUPTFD were EEA nationals.

Answered by:
Lucy Frazer (Conservative)
14 September 2020