Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of sending prisoners serving sentences in England and Wales to prisons overseas.

We have prisoner transfer agreements with over 100 countries which enable us to send foreign national offenders to serve the remainder of their prison sentence in their home country. We are reviewing the opportunities to strengthen or expand these arrangements.

The previous Government explored the possibility of sending British prisoners to rented prisons overseas. There are no current plans to introduce this measure, which we believe carries considerable cost. This Government is in the market for practical approaches that work, and not for costly gimmicks, unlike our predecessors