Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of foreign national offenders were released from prison in each quarter since 2012; and of these how many were released because (a) an immigration judge granted bail, (b) her Department granted bail, (c) an immigration judge accepted an appeal against deportation, (d) they were released at the end of a prison sentence and (e) of a mental health discharge.

The Home Office publishes data relating to numbers of FNOs released into the community by reason of release in the Immigration Enforcement transparency data. Table FNO_02 of the latest Immigration Enforcement data contains data on FNOs released into the community by reason for release up to the end of December 2021. Please see the ‘Notes’ sheet for information about how to use the data.

Data in this series after the end of 2021 is not currently available from published statistics, and the relevant data could only be collated and verified for the purpose of answering this question at disproportionate cost.

The Home Office also publishes data on people leaving detention by reason for leaving in the Immigration System Statistics release. This includes any detainees held in prisons under immigration detention powers, or in the detention estate under custodial or immigration detention powers. Some of these cases will be FNOs, but not all FNOs who are released from prison will be included in this data. This data is published on a quarterly basis in Det_D03 of the detention detailed datasets. The latest data is for the end of September 2024. Data covering the period of October to December 2024 is due to be published on 27th February 2025.

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.