Foreign criminals freed from UK jails committed 10,000 offences in one year

Shocking new data has revealed foreign criminals who swerved being deported committed 10,000 offences in just one year.

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show a quarter of foreign criminals have gone on to reoffend in Britain after being released from prison and staying in the country.

According to the Telegaph, each of 3,325 foreign offenders accounted for three crimes on average, giving a total in the year March 2022 of 10,012 offences – a 25% rise on the figures for the previous year.

In total the MoJ data shows that foreign offenders in the UK were responsible for a staggering 40,000 crimes – ranging from knife possession and drug dealing, to murder.

The figures include crimes committed by criminals who returned to Britain and committed further offences after being deported.

Rupert Lowe, the Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, who extracted the data from the MoJ, told the Telegraph: “Everyone who commits a crime should be deported. Why are we tolerating this, particularly when we see the reoffending rates are so high.”

Mr Lowe has urged the Government to be more open with information and figures about crimes committed by migrants.

His thoughts are echoed by former immigration minister Robert Jenrick who has proposed legislation that would require the Labour Government to present a report each year to Parliament detailing the visa and asylum status of offenders convicted in the courts of England and Wales for the previous 12 months.

Mr Jenrick said: “Tens of thousands of offences a year would be prevented if the Government took a zero-tolerance approach to deporting foreign national offenders. The public expects robust action.”

According to national data there are more than 10,000 foreign nationals serving sentences in UK prisons, making up a huge 12% of the total and costing the taxpayer millions each year.

Nationalities listed include Albanians, who are the most numerous, followed by Polish, Romanian, Irish and Jamaican. Ernesto Elliott, a Jamaican criminal jailed for knife crime, went on to murder a 35-year-old man in a knife fight after being released from prison.

Elliot avoided deportation after a last-minute appeal which led to him and 22 other serious criminals avoiding deportation on a flight on December 2, 2020.

Celebrities and public figures had opposed the deportation flight and signed a letter against it. Elliot was jailed for at least 26 years for murder after a knife fight in south east London.

In another case an Albanian gangster who walked back into the UK after deportation managed to live freely for years before he was finally caught with two loaded guns and £70,000 worth of cannabis.

An MoJ spokesman said: “It costs tens of thousands to hold an offender in prison and since the new Government came into power, we have returned 14 per cent more foreign national offenders than in the same period last year.

“As the public would rightly expect, we continue to work closely with the Home Office to deport more foreign national offenders, keeping our streets safe and saving taxpayers millions.”