Prisoners: Foreign Nationals

(asked on 9th February 2022) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much compensation has been paid out to detainees across the prison estate for having to wait for a Home Office decision on an authority to detain notification (IS91) once they have already served their sentence in each year since 2010.


Answered by
Tom Pursglove Portrait
Tom Pursglove
Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
This question was answered on 21st February 2022

The Government is committed to a fair and humane immigration policy that welcomes those here legally, but tackles abuse and protects the public.

We make every effort to ensure that a foreign national offender’s (FNO) removal by deportation coincides, as far as possible, with their release from prison on completion of sentence. Detention plays a crucial role in enabling the removal of FNOs and those who are here illegally.

Published Home Office policy, Detention General instructions (publishing.service.gov.uk), is clear that immigration detention must be used sparingly and for the shortest period necessary. Where the Home Office intends to detain a time-served FNO under immigration powers at the end of their custodial sentence, detention notices are served in advance of this date, subject to certain exceptions. A timely risk assessment is also carried, out in line with published guidance, which reviews the suitability of the FNOs transfer to the immigration removal estate.

Foreign national offenders held in detention have the option to apply to an independent immigration judge for bail at any point. Once a person is in detention, regular reviews are undertaken to ensure that their detention remains lawful, appropriate and proportionate. We do not detain people indefinitely.

The Home Office publishes data on people in immigration detention in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. The number of people in detention on the last day of each quarter are published in table Det_D02 of the Detention detailed datasets. The data include those detained under immigration powers in HM prisons from July 2017 and can be broken down by place of detention. The latest data relate to the number of people in detention at the end of September 2021.

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