Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to help reduce the number of illegal migrants in prisons.

Foreign national offenders (FNOs) should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them and more than 13,000 have been removed between January 2019 and December 2022.

We are doing all we can to ensure that FNOs cannot frustrate their removal process through new provisions introduced by the Nationality and Borders Act and the Illegal Migration Bill. The Act makes it easier and quicker to remove FNOs and those with no right to be in the UK. It extends the period an FNO can be removed from prison under the early removal scheme (ERS) from a maximum of 9 months to 12 months, providing the minimum requisite period has been served.

The UK and Albania signed a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Albania in July 2021 which commits that Albanian nationals in prisons in England and Wales serving sentences of 4 years or more will be sent back to serve the remainder of their sentence in Albanian prisons.

In May 2023, the UK and Albanian governments agreed a ground-breaking arrangement which builds on this agreement that will see hundreds of Albanian prisoners returned to their home country in exchange for UK support to help modernise the Albanian prison system.