Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with regard to the Answer of 9 February to Question 149327, why the information requested is only be available at disproportionate cost when it has previously been supplied for the period up to March 2019 in response to Freedom of Information request reference 54393 dated 29 July 2019.

The information requested is not available from published statistics.

I note the Honourable Member references previous questions, but they are not identical. As such the information requested is not available in a reportable format and would require a manual check of individual records which could only be done at disproportionate cost.

Any foreign national who is convicted of a crime and given a prison sentence is considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity.

Section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007 provides a statutory duty to deport a foreign national if they have been convicted of an offence in the UK and sentenced to a period of imprisonment of at least 12 months. This is subject to several exceptions, including where to do so would be a breach of a person’s ECHR rights or the UK’s obligations under the Refugee Convention.

Where a decision is made to deport, and representations are raised against that decision, an FNO is likely to be granted a right of appeal. This may be exercised in or out of country depending on the circumstances of the case.

The Home Office publishes data on Returns in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release(opens in a new tab)’. Data on the number of Returns from the UK by return type (including enforced returns) are published in table Ret_01 of the Returns ‘summary tables(opens in a new tab)’.

The term 'deportations' refers to a legally-defined 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. Information on those deported is not separately available and therefore the published statistics refer to all enforced returns.

The MoJ publishes data on Appeals in the following statistical quarterly release, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tribunal-statistics-quarterly-july-to-september-2020(opens in a new tab).

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.