Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many foreign nationals are held in the prison estate by nationality.

Data on how many Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) are held in custody are published in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly: Offender management statistics quarterly: July to September 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). For data on the prison population by nationality, see prison population table 1_7.

The latest published data from 31 December 2023 shows that there were 10,423 (3,333 remand, 6,697 sentenced and 393 non-criminal) FNOs held in custody; representing 12% of the total prison population. The most common nationalities after British Nationals in prisons are Albanian (13% of the FNO prison population), Polish (9%), Romanian (7%), Irish (6%) and Jamaican (4%).

The removal of FNOs is a Government priority and my department continues to work closely with the Home Office to maximise the number of deportations.

Published figures show that FNO returns have increased following the pandemic, in the latest 12-month period (ending December 2023) by 27% when compared to the previous 12-month period. Between January 2019 and December 2023 17,795 FNOs have been removed.

The proportion of FNOs held in custody is 12% of the total prison population and has remained stable in recent years while the overall prison population has grown.

On 11 March, the Government set out a plan to increase the number of FNOs removed through:

• The recruitment of 400 additional caseworkers and streamlining the end-to-end removal process;
• Extending foreign national conditional cautions to FNOs with limited leave to remain; and
• Amending deportation policy to enable FNOs given suspended sentences of 6 months or more to be considered for deportation.

These actions build on our expansion of the Early Removal Scheme to allow for removal of FNOs up to 18 months before the end of the custodial element of their sentence, and expediting prisoner transfers with priority countries such as Albania and seeking to conclude new transfer agreements with partner countries.