Foreign prisoners are now costing British taxpayers more than £1million per day, official figures have shown.
New data by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has revealed there are around 10,500 foreign prisoners being held in jails across England and Wales, each costing more than £50,000 a year.
In fact, around 12 per cent of all prisoners in the UK are foreign nationals.
Among the nationalities with the most prisoners in the UK, Albanians lead the unwanted league table with more than 1,200 inmates. Poles are in second with 911, followed by Romanians (729), Irish (634) and Jamaicans (370).
Around half of those prisoners have been sentenced while the other 50 per cent are being held on remand either because they are thought to be too dangerous to release or because they are considered a flight risk.
A Freedom of Information request seen by The Telegraph showed violent crime was most common among inmates from Poland, with 215. While Romanians were most likely to be involved with sex offences, with 88 prisoners.
Ireland topped the table for robbery (80) and theft (11) while Albanians were most likely to be jailed for drug offences, with 439 held on these charges, four times more than any other nationality.
The MoJ has committed to spending £5million on new frontline immigration staff to accelerate the removal of foreign prisoners.
Data shows that foreign offenders make up around 12 per cent of the country’s total prison population (file image)
Labour’s Prisons Minister Lord James Timpson said foreign criminals will be deported quicker with a new £5million immigration unit
They plan to work across 80 jails to remove some foreign offenders, in order to rduce the soaring costs and free up spaces in Britain’s already overcrowded prisons.
This new unit will be operational by April 1 and will also support the Home Office to identify and manage those going through the immigration process, deporting criminals up to 18 months before the end of their custodial sentence.
Labour says it had removed more than 2,500 foreign criminals since last July.
Prisons minister Lord James Timpson said: ‘It cannot be right for British taxpayers to foot the bill for jailing foreign criminals who have brought misery to our communities.
‘Under this Government, removals are up by nearly 20 per cent. We’re now taking action to ensure this is done swifter, easing pressure on overcrowded prisons and on the public purse.
‘This is part of our Plan for Change – fixing the broken prison system we inherited and keeping our streets safe.’
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said removing foreign criminals from prisons should be a priority and argued that countries who refuse to take them back should be blacklisted for migrants wishing to enter the UK from that country.
Mr Jenrick said: ‘That is the number one thing we can do to free up prison capacity. And how do you do that? Use every lever of the British state to put pressure on those other countries to take back their own criminals.
‘Do things like stopping issuing visas, don’t give foreign aid to those countries. If they won’t take back their criminals, we shouldn’t be supporting them.’
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood during a visit to HMP Bedford in Harpur, Bedfordshire
As previously reported, foreign nationals are up to three times more likely to be arrested than Brits in parts of the country, according to data by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
In Cambridgeshire, of the more than 21,200 arrests made between 2021 and 2023, nearly 8,800 (41.5 per cent) were not UK citizens. This is despite them comprising just 15 per cent of the local population.
Statistics from Cambridgeshire Police, which covers cities such as Cambridge and Peterborough, suggest foreign nationals residing in the UK are three times as likely to be arrested on suspicion of a crime than Brits.
In the county, the average annual arrest rate for foreign nationals between 2021 and 2023 was 21.5 per 1,000 population. In comparison, MailOnline analysis suggests the equivalent rate for Brits was 6.5 per 1,000.
Last year, shocking data from MoJ revealed that foreign criminals who avoided deportation carried out more than 10,000 crimes in a year.
The data shows nearly a quarter of foreign offenders were responsible for a further offence after being released from jail or handed a court order.
The 3,235 criminals who were freed from jail without being deported were behind 10,012 offences in the year to March 2022 – a rise of 25 per cent on the last annual total of 8,021.
Over the last four years of data – released by officials in a parliamentary question – foreign offenders were guilty of 40,000 crimes ranging from robbery and drug dealing to murder.
As well as criminals who were freed from jail and avoided deportation, the MOJ data also includes people who were previously deported before returning to Britain illegally.
