Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many foreign criminals were granted temporary release in each of the last five years.

The Department currently has no plans to publish a breakdown of foreign national offenders by nationality and detailed offence type (which would include the requested information for rape, other sexual offences, murder and drug trafficking). However, we keep all our publications under review in line with the three key pillars of the Code of Practice for Statistics: trustworthiness, quality and value.

The requested data on the number of foreign criminals granted temporary release in each of the last 5 years can be found in the attached table.

The Ministry of Justice publishes information on the number of defendants convicted for stalking offences in the Outcomes by Offence data tool: December 2023. However, it is not possible to identify an offender’s nationality from the centrally collated convictions data. This information may be held on court records but to examine individual court records would be of disproportionate costs.

Foreign national offenders who commit crime should be in no doubt that the law will be enforced and, we will work with the Home Office to pursue their deportation. We are currently on track to remove more FNOs this year than at any time in recent years. We are working across government, to explore the ways that we can accelerate this further.