Labour must prioritise deporting foreign criminals (Image: Getty)
Deporting foreign criminals should be the Government’s “top priority” to ease the prison overcrowding crisis and keep the public safe, Sir has been warned.
Shocking Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data has revealed foreign national offenders committed 10,000 crimes in a single year after staying in the UK.
Each of the 3,235 crooks who were freed accounted for three crimes on average, giving the total in the year to March 2022 of 10,012 further offences.
Government critics claimed increasing deportations could ease .
Robert Jenrick has urged ministers to take urgent action (Image: Getty)
told the Daily Express: “These foreign nationals have abused our generosity and should feel the consequences.
“The Government should be so we can protect the public and save the taxpayer millions of pounds.
“At a time when prisons are short of capacity, this should be their top priority.”
Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, who uncovered the figures, said on Wednesday: “Those criminals, when they are released, they have very high rates of reoffence.
“So why should, again, the British people be subjected to foreign criminals going into our prisons, blocking them up so we let our own prisoners out early, which we’ve been doing because we haven’t got enough prison space?
“They are released and they perpetrate a crime on an honest, decent British person.
“Wrong.
“So what we have to do is start dealing with that. Deport them. If you come here and you live here, and you commit a crime, you go.”
Justice chiefs admitted that a quarter of foreign criminals went on to reoffend after being released from jail.
And the number of offences committed by foreign crooks has increased by 25% compared to the previous year’s total of 8,021 offences committed by 2,462 freed criminals.
MoJ figures show there were 86,059 adult prisoners behind bars in England and Wales on Monday, slightly higher than the 86,038 recorded at the beginning of last week.
The so-called operational capacity for English and Welsh men and women’s prisons is 88,852, indicating there is now cell space for 2,793 criminals.
The latest data means the prison population is only 2.8% lower than when the number of inmates being held hit a new record high of 88,521 on September 6
Tory grandee Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said: “A more logical solution to our lack of prison spaces, rather than letting people out, is to deport the foreign criminals.
“However, there seems to be no great desire to do this.
“The problem is that the standard practice in the UK has been to make foreign criminals serve between 40-50% of their sentences, similar to other malefactors, before attempting to deport them.
“While there may be a case for this, in some instances where there are victim interests to consider or the crime is especially heinous, the Government’s default position ought to be to deport any foreign criminal immediately upon conviction, banning them from returning.
“When this default policy has shifted, along with withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and an overhaul of domestic human rights laws to smooth the process of deporting illegal migrants, we may begin to have a serious immigration in enforcement system.”
Offences ranged from murder to knife possession and drug dealing. Some did leave the UK, only to return to commit further crimes.