Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many foreign nationals convicted as a result of investigations into grooming gangs have (a) been deported from and (b) remain in the UK.

The information is not available to the level of detail requested. The Home Office publishes data on Returns of foreign nationals in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the number of Returns of FNOS from the UK are published in table Ret_02 of the Returns ‘summary tables’.

Child Sexual Exploitation is an abhorrent crime and has no place in our society. This Government is absolutely determined to do all it can to tackle it.

The new national Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy sets out our response to all forms of child sexual abuse, including how we will work across government, law enforcement, safeguarding partners and industry to root out offending, and protect and help victims and survivors to recover and rebuild their lives.

This Government’s priority is keeping the people of this country safe and we are clear that foreign criminals should be deported from the UK wherever it is legal and practical to do so.

Any foreign national who is convicted of a crime and given a prison sentence is considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity. Since January 2019 we have removed 6,450 foreign national offenders.