Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many immigration offenders excluding failed asylum seekers and foreign national offenders have been removed from the UK in each of the last five years for which figures are available; and how many of those so removed first arrived in the UK on a student visa.

The Home Office publishes data on the number of returns from the UK in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’ (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release). Data on the number of Returns (of which deportations are a subset) are published in table Ret_D01 of the Returns detailed datasets (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/returns-and-detention-datasets).

The term 'deportations' refers to a legally-defined subset of returns which are enforced either following a criminal conviction or when it is judged that a person’s removal from the UK is conducive to the public good. Information on those deported is not separately available and therefore the published statistics refer to all enforced returns.

Please note that only some of those returned will have previously entered the UK illegally; others may have entered legally, for example those who enter on a visa and overstay their period of valid leave and are therefore not separately identifiable in the data.

Information on the number of individuals returned who first arrived in the UK on a student visa would require a manual check of individual records which could only be done at disproportionate cost.