Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information her Department holds on the number of people who have entered Britain illegally in the last three years that have previously been convicted of a crime in another country.

The Home Office publishes statistics on the number of people who are detected arriving in the UK via illegal entry routes in the Immigration system statistics quarterly release. The published statistics do not show whether those arriving have previously been convicted of a crime.

Information on the number of people in the immigration system who may have foreign convictions would involve collating and verifying information from multiple systems owned by various teams across the Home Office and, therefore, could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.