Adam Afriyie – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Adam Afriyie on 2015-11-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of foreign nationals convicted of a crime in the UK were deported to their country of origin in each of the last three years.

James Brokenshire

The following table shows the number of Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) who have been convicted of a criminal offence and sentenced to a period of imprisonment and subsequently referred to Immigration Enforcement for consideration of removal action.

Whilst we aim to deport foreign national offenders at the earliest opportunity not all of those referred to the Home Office will meet the deportation threshold, some may later be confirmed as British or exempt from Immigration Control and some will be successful at appeal. Removal may also be delayed as some offenders will repeatedly refuse to comply with the deportation and documentation process, deliberately seek to flout the system to disrupt our efforts to deport them or attempt to lodge multiple appeals. Factors such as these can lead to deportation being delayed.

In May 2013, a new system was introduced for recording and monitoring all FNO referrals, even where an offender did not meet the deportation threshold. Prior to this, referrals of those who did not meet deportation criteria were not routed through a central system so this data was not centrally recorded. The introduction of this system therefore shows an increase in the referral numbers from 2012/13 onwards.

The National Offender Management Service operate on a nationality self declaration basis, which means that not all those referred for action will be in scope for removal. Some offenders may later be confirmed as British nationals or exempt from immigration control.

The removals shown are not a representative proportion of those referred in the same period. Those referred will not always be removable in the same year due to sentence length. The removals data will include those who have been referred prior to the period shown in the table.

Please note that figures prior to the 2011/12 financial year precede the implementation of a later reporting application and as such were not subject to the same level of data assurance for data recorded after 2011/12.