Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will publish a breakdown of criminal offenders who were ordered to be deported at the end of their prison sentence by (a) shortest prison sentence imposed, (b) average prison sentence imposed, (c) longest prison sentence imposed and (d) criminal offence convicted in each of the last six years.

The Home Office publishes data on returns of foreign national offenders (FNOs) in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on quarterly numbers of returns of FNOs are published in table Ret_02a of the ‘returns summary tables’. Information on how to use the dataset can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbook. The latest data reports up to the year ending June 2024.

Deportations are a specific subset of returns which are enforced either following a criminal conviction or when it is judged that a person’s removal from the UK is conducive to the public good. The deportation order prohibits the person returning to the UK until such time as it may be revoked.

Information about sentence length and offence type are not currently included in our published statistics and could only be obtained for the purposes of this question at a disproportionate cost. Official statistics published by the Home Office are kept under review in line with the code of practice for statistics, taking into account a number of factors including user needs, the resources required to compile the statistics, as well as quality and availability of data. These reviews allow us to balance the production of our regular statistics whilst developing new statistics for future release.