The justice secretary will commit to freeing up space in the dangerously overcrowded prison estate by deporting more foreign criminals and phasing out short sentences in favour of community punishments.
Two-thirds of prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded, according to Guardian analysis of official figures, and last week judges were told to delay the sentencing of convicted criminals on bail, including rapists and burglars, because jails are almost full.
According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), more than one in nine prisoners, – 10,500 out of 88,225 – are foreign national offenders, costing the taxpayer about £500m a year.
Any foreign prisoner sentenced to more than 12 months in jail can be deported up to a year before the end of their sentence. Under new plans expected to be announced by the justice secretary and lord chancellor, Alex Chalk, on Monday, this will be brought forward by six months.
The plan is understood to involve the already overstretched Home Office employing more immigration case workers.
Targeting foreign prisoners has been a tactic of successive governments looking to reduce the prison population, with generally poor results.
In 2015, David Cameron, as prime minister, announced plans to pay £25m to Jamaica to build a new prison in return for accepting 300 Jamaican criminals, which fell through when the deal was rejected by the Caribbean island’s government.
Many prisoners successfully argue that deportation would breach their human rights to family and private life. Others are desperate to return home but find that their native country doesn’t want them back.
In the year ending September 2022, 2,958 foreign national offenders were returned from the UK, according to the Home Office. The largest cohort (807) were Albanians, followed by 638 Romanians and 284 Poles.
There has been a steep fall in deportations since the Covid pandemic in 2020. Between 2013 and 2019, the UK returned between 5,000 and 6,437 foreign offenders each year.
There are two prisons which hold exclusively foreign prisoners awaiting deportation: HMP Maidstone in Kent and HMP Huntercombe near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.
They are among the two-thirds of prisons that are overcrowded, with Maidstone holding 47 more men than it has “decent” accommodation for, and Huntercombe 88 too many.
Judith Feline, who quit as governor of HMP Maidstone last year, said: “In my experience, there were many foreign nationals desperate to go home as well as many with full lives here who wanted to remain. Whilst working in a jail for foreign national prisoners I witnessed how slow a process deportation was.”
She added: “I expect it will require significant numbers of new Home Office staff for this initiative to be effective. We have to hope they are not recruited from the Prison Service as that will prove rather self-defeating.”
This additional work for the Home Office will put further strain on other areas in the department, including its immigration caseload, where it is struggling to cope with a record backlog in the asylum system. At the end of June, 175,457 people were waiting for an initial decision on an asylum application in the UK, up 44% compared with a year earlier and the highest figure since current records began in 2010.
Andrew Neilson, head of campaigns for the Howard League For Penal Reform, said the idea of upping deportations was not new: “Successive governments have announced plans to reduce the number of foreign national prisoners and yet they stubbornly remain a sizeable proportion of the prison population.”
He argued that the money spent on securing agreements with other countries is a “distraction from the domestic issue, which is that we have a prison population projected to soar to over 100,000 in the next decade. And that will not primarily be foreign prisoners.”
Chalk wants to strike new prisoner transfer deals like the one recently agreed with Albania, under which the UK will pay the country about £8m over two years to take back 200 of its offenders.
He will also announce plans to impose strict conditions on foreign criminals to ban them from returning to the UK, and confirm that the government will bring forward legislation to enable prisoners to be held, no matter where they are from, in prisons overseas.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Chalk also promised to “look again at low-level offenders … moving away from short-term prison sentences that make hardened criminals rather than rehabilitated offenders.”
He wrote: “A short stretch of a few months inside isn’t enough time to rehabilitate criminals, but is more than enough to dislocate them from the family, work and home connections that keep them from crime. Too often, offenders routinely turn back to crime as soon as they walk out of the prison gates.”
• This article was amended on 16 October 2023 to clarify that the Home Office’s asylum seekers caseload is separate to the department’s work relating to foreign criminals.
