Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many foreign nationals have been deported in the last five years.

The Home Office publishes data on FNO returns in the quarterly Immigration System Statistics release. Quarterly data on enforced, voluntary and port FNO returns (of which ‘deportations’ are a legal subset) are published in table Ret_D03 of the Returns detailed datasets accompanying the release.

Information on FNOs who have been deported more than once, or who have returned to the UK after deportation, 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.

A deportation order requires a person to leave the UK and prohibits them from lawfully entering the UK while it remains in force. Entering in breach of a deportation order is a criminal offence under section 24(1)(a) of the 1971 Act, with a maximum sentence of five years under section 40 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022.