Foreign National Offenders, Prisons and Probation

Monday 11th March 2024 Written Statements

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)]

Our plan to cut crime and keep the public safe is working. Violent and neighbourhood crime have reduced by over 50% since 2010, and the reoffending rate is down from 31% to 25%. We are locking up more criminals for longer: over the past decade, the average time offenders spend behind bars increased by more than 40% and rapists now go to prison for nearly three years longer, on average, than in 2010. We have already ended Labour’s automatic halfway release for serious sexual and violent offenders so they will serve two-thirds of their sentence behind bars. We are currently legislating so that rapists serve the full custodial part of their sentence behind bars and to ensure that life means life for the most horrific murderers.

We will always ensure we have sufficient prison capacity to lock up the most serious and dangerous offenders. We are on track to deliver 10,000 new prison places by the end of 2025 and have a long-term commitment to build 20,000 new prison places overall—the largest prison building programme since the Victorian era. In addition, we are doubling up cells where it is safe to do so.

We need to go further to ensure we can continue locking up serious and violent offenders for longer. The number of foreign national offenders (FNOs) has increased over recent years and now makes up over 10,000 prisoners in England and Wales—about 12%—at an average cost to the taxpayer of £50,000 per year, reducing the capacity of the prison system. These are people who should be removed back to their own countries of origin wherever possible. We have made progress: last year the Government returned nearly 4,000 FNOs from prison and the community, a 27% increase compared to the year before.

In January, the Government extended the early removal scheme from a maximum period of 12 months to 18 months, so eligible FNOs can be deported up to six months earlier. Almost 400 FNOs have already been removed from the UK via this scheme since January—a 61% increase compared to the equivalent period a year earlier. We have also signed a robust new agreement with Albania which has restarted transfers of Albanian FNOs, and we are legislating in the Criminal Justice Bill to enable prisoners to be transferred and held in rented prisons overseas, as several EU countries have done.

We must now build on this progress by ensuring that even more FNOs are removed from the country as quickly as possible and spurious barriers to removal are quickly dismissed, so we will:

Radically change the way we process FNO cases—we have created a new taskforce across the HO and MoJ—including the prison service, immigration enforcement and asylum and modern slavery teams, surging 400 additional caseworkers to prioritise these cases who will all be in place by the end of March and streamlining the end-to-end removal process.

Expedite prisoner transfers with our priority countries such as Albania and conclude new transfer agreements with partner countries such as Italy.

Be fully prepared to make use of the powers provided under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 to restrict visas for any country where no progress on foreign national offender removals can be made.

Amend our existing deportation policy to enable foreign national offenders given suspended sentences of six months or more to be considered for deportation under the Immigration Act 1971 on the ground it is conducive to the public good, enabling us to remove more foreign national offenders from the country.

Bring forward an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to extend foreign national conditional cautions to foreign national offenders with limited leave. Currently, this type of caution can only be given to foreign national offenders who do not have leave to enter or leave to remain in the UK, enabling us to remove more foreign national offenders from the country.

This will allow us to return almost double the number of FNOs directly from prison in 2024, compared to 1,800 last year, and make more returns of FNOs from prison than in any year since 2010, saving the taxpayer millions of pounds and keeping our streets safe.

We must also address the unsustainable growth in the remand population since the pandemic and Criminal Bar Association action. Since 2019, the remand population has increased by over 6,000 to more than 16,000 today, in part because we made the right decision for public protection and did not release tens of thousands of prisoners at the start of the pandemic, as many other countries did. We also made the right decision for access to justice and refused calls to scrap trial by jury. This has placed additional pressure on the prison estate and on the criminal justice system as a whole. The Lady Chief Justice has confirmed that if bail applications are made to the magistrates’ court or renewed before the Crown court, the courts remain ready to hear them within the short time limits provided for in the criminal procedure rules. We are also exploring at pace with the senior judiciary the roll-out of a remote nationwide pilot Crown court capable of hearing new bail applications. The pilot would monitor whether these additional measures result in an increase in the use of tagging and appropriate support packages in bail applications.

In order to support this, the Government will invest £53 million additional funding to expand the Bail Information Service, part of the productivity package the Chancellor announced at the Budget. This will enable our court system to be more efficient by increasing the court-based staff and digital systems that can provide critical information to the judiciary, making the bail process more efficient. To support this work, a further £22 million of additional funding will be available in 2024-25 to fund community accommodation.

We will also increase awareness about the availability of tags, especially high tech GPS and alcohol monitoring tags, to ensure that offenders can be monitored in the community.

We will also extend the existing end-of-custody supervised licence measure to around 35 to 60 days. We will enable this to happen for a time-limited period, and work with the police, prisons and probation leaders to make further adjustments as required. This will only be for certain low-level offenders. Where necessary, electronic monitoring will be applied, enhancing public protection. Ministers will continue to keep the use of this measure under review.

These measures all rely on a probation service that can focus its attention on the most critical points of the justice system, especially when an offender is first released from prison. In 2021 the Government created the unified probation service, which brought together all of probation into a single national organisation. We have invested £155 million of extra funding each year in the service and onboarded over 4,000 trainee probation officers since then. That is why we will be taking steps to refocus probation practice on the points that matter most to public protection and reducing offending.

From April, we will reset probation so that practitioners prioritise early engagement at the point where offenders are most likely to breach their licence conditions, allowing frontline staff to maximise supervision of the most serious offenders. Similarly, for those managed on community orders and suspended sentence orders, probation practitioners will ensure intervention and engagement is prioritised towards the first two-thirds of the sentence, as experience shows that this most effectively rehabilitates offenders.

We express our deep gratitude for the efforts of all those working in the criminal justice system: prisons, probation and courts staff, the police, prosecutors and lawyers, and the judiciary. They deserve credit for their enormous commitment and professionalism in their vital work to keep the country safe.

[HCWS332]