PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Offenders: Foreign Nationals (25 March 2021)

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the number of foreign national offenders in the UK; and what steps she is taking to identify and deport those offenders.

Asked by:
Sir John Hayes (Conservative)

The Government is clear foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality by committing crimes should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them. Any foreign national who is convicted of a crime and given a prison sentence is considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity.

For non-European Economic Area (EEA) nationals, deportation will be pursued where it is conducive to the public good including where a person receives a custodial sentence of 12 months or more, commits an offence that caused serious harm or is a persistent offender. European Economic Area (EEA) nationals are deported in accordance with European Union (EU) law on the grounds of public policy or public security where relevant conduct occurred before 1 January 2021 and under the same deportation thresholds that apply to non-EEA nationals for relevant conduct after 31 December 2020.

No guarantee can ever be given that every foreign criminal will have their deportation enforced – for example, sometimes the UK’s current obligations under international law such as the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights ultimately prohibit us from returning certain individuals despite their criminality. Legal or re-documentation barriers can frustrate immediate deportation. However, we never give up trying to deport these individuals to make our communities safer and since January 2019 we have removed 7,240 foreign national offenders.

The Home Office publishes data on individuals detained in the Home Office detention estate and HM Prisons solely under Immigration Act powers and Returns of people who do not have any legal right to stay in the UK in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’ and Transparency release - Immigration Enforcement data.

Answered by:
Chris Philp (Conservative)
13 April 2021