Asked by: Rupert Lowe (Independent - Great Yarmouth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many detention places are currently available for foreign nationals awaiting deportation.
Answered by Alex Norris - Minister of State (Home Office)
Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) are used flexibly to detain foreign nationals liable for removal from the UK. This includes time-served foreign national offenders, immigration offenders and those who have arrived in the UK illegally. As of 1 September, the Home Office has the capacity to detain around 2,400 people in IRCs, including time-served foreign national offenders awaiting deportation.
The Government takes the protection of the public and escapes from immigration detention extremely seriously. There are robust security measures in all IRCs to prevent residents from escaping.
The Home Office releases data on escapes from immigration detention on an annual basis. The latest published statistics are for 2024. These are available at: Immigration system statistics, year ending June 2025 - GOV.UK.
Asked by: Lewis Cocking (Conservative - Broxbourne)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department records the number of repeat offenders within the asylum seeker population.
Answered by Alex Norris - Minister of State (Home Office)
The information you have requested is not available from published statistics.
The UK will always offer protection to those in genuine need, but we will not allow our asylum system to be exploited by those who commit crimes or endanger our communities.
Any Foreign National who is convicted of a crime, including those seeking asylum, are referred to the Home Office for deportation immediately following sentencing and will be excluded from protection under the Refugee Convention if they have committed a ‘particularly serious crime’ as defined in Section 72 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002.
The government has also toughened the definition of a ‘particularly serious crime’ to include all sexual offence convictions that trigger notification requirements through another BSAI Bill amendment announced earlier this year. For the first time, foreign nationals on the sex offenders’ register will be automatically denied refugee status.
In the first year of this government over 35,000 individuals with no right to be here, including failed asylum seekers and foreign national offenders, have already been returned - a 13% increase compared to the same period 12 months prior.
Asked by: Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party - Strangford)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to deport convicted violent foreign criminals.
Answered by Alex Norris - Minister of State (Home Office)
We are committed to delivering justice for victims and safer streets for our communities. Foreign nationals who commit serious crimes will face the full force of the law and be deported at the earliest opportunity.
This government has already removed almost 5,200 foreign national offenders in its first year of office, a 14 per cent increase on the previous twelve months (5 July 2024 to 4 July 2025) and we will continue to crack down on any foreign nationals who come to this country and break our rules.
Asked by: Lewis Cocking (Conservative - Broxbourne)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether her Department has made an assessment of the effectiveness of the deterrent effect of immediate deportation for foreign nationals convicted of criminal offences.
Answered by Alex Davies-Jones - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The removal of Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) is a priority of this Government, which is why we are introducing new measures to enable the earlier removal of determinate sentenced FNOs as soon after sentencing as possible.
Deportation is a significant punishment and it is beneficial for us to deport FNOs as quickly as possible to protect the public, reduce pressures on prison capacity and mitigate the associated expense to the taxpayer. Once removed they will be barred from ever returning.
Asked by: Lewis Cocking (Conservative - Broxbourne)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many foreign nationals have avoided deportation following criminal convictions due to the absence of a removal agreement with their country of origin.
Answered by Angela Eagle - Minister of State (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The specific information requested is not readily available from published statistics and could only be obtained for the purposes of answering this question at disproportionate cost.
However, this government has already removed almost 5,200 foreign national offenders in its first year of office (5 July 2024 to 4 July 2025), a 14 per cent increase on the previous twelve months and we will continue to crack down on any foreign nationals who come to this country and break our rules.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the remarks by Lord Hanson of Flint on 10 July (HL Deb col 1487), whether there have been any instances of the General Data Protection Regulation or other data protection legislation preventing the Home Office from removing foreign criminals from the UK.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The UK’s data protection legislation allows for personal data to be processed to pursue legitimate aims.
In particular, the international transfers regimes, which this Government recently improved through the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, allows for personal data to be transferred to third countries where that is necessary for important reasons of public interest, including for immigration control and law enforcement.
Asked by: Robert Jenrick (Reform UK - Newark)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what meetings ministers in her Department have had with their counterparts in (a) Albania, (b) Poland, (c) Romania, (d) Jamaica, (e) Lithuania, (f) Bulgaria and (g) Vietnam on the removal of foreign national offenders since 17 July 2024.
Answered by Nicholas Dakin - Vice Chamberlain (HM Household) (Whip, House of Commons)
Increasing the numbers of foreign national offender returns from our prisons is a priority for this Government.
We are working with international partners wherever possible to help achieve this.
Asked by: Lee Anderson (Reform UK - Ashfield)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of deporting all foreign criminals currently in prison.
Answered by Nicholas Dakin - Vice Chamberlain (HM Household) (Whip, House of Commons)
The removal of Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) is an important priority of this Government. We refer all FNOs in receipt of custodial sentences to the Home Office to consider deportation and we are taking decisive steps to increase removals.
In the past year, 5,179 FNOs have been deported. This is a 14% increase in returns compared to the same period 12 months prior.
We have accepted the recommendations of the sentencing review to enable earlier deportation of FNOs. On 25 June 2025, we laid legislation to expand the Early Release Scheme to allow FNOs to be removed up to 4 years before the earliest release point of their sentence (increased from 18 months now), subject to having served 30% of the custodial element of their sentence (allowing earlier removal compared to the 50% minimum time needed to serve now). This is estimated to further increase deportations and reduce demand by up to 500 prison places per year.
Asked by: Lewis Cocking (Conservative - Broxbourne)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many foreign national offenders are living in the UK and have received deportation orders.
Answered by Angela Eagle - Minister of State (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The Home Office routinely publishes the number of FNOs subject to deportation proceedings and living in the community within its Immigration Enforcement quarterly transparency release. The latest release can be found at: Migration transparency data - GOV.UK, which shows up to the end of Q1 2025.
The Home Office works tirelessly to clear legal barriers, secure documentation or overcome other impediments to a return. Between 5 July 2024 and 18 May 2025, there were 4,436 enforced and voluntary returns of FNOs. This is an increase of 14% compared to the 3,879 FNO returns in the same period 12 months prior.
The Home Office also continues to work closely with HMPPS (HM Prisons and Probation Service) to focus on driving up the returns of FNOs direct from prison, delivering 2,274 early removal scheme (ERS) returns, which is an 11% increase compared with the 2,050 in the same period 12 months prior.
Asked by: Nick Timothy (Conservative - West Suffolk)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information her Department holds on the number of foreign national offenders who have cited Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights as a reason not to be removed since 2019, broken down by (a) year, (b) nationality and (c) offence committed.
Answered by Angela Eagle - Minister of State (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The information requested is not currently available from published statistics, and could only be obtained for the purpose of answering this question through a manual search of case files, something that could only be done at disproportionate cost.
Work is underway to improve the quality of information held by the department on foreign national offenders (FNOs). Further information on this work can be found at: Statistics on foreign national offenders and the immigration system - GOV.UK.