Foreign prisoners cost UK taxpayer bombshell £630MILLION a year | UK | News
Foreign criminals held in British prisons cost taxpayers almost £630 million a year. Official figures released last week show that around one-eighth of the total prison population is made up of foreign-born criminals. Approximately 10,487 of the 87,342 prisoners held in British prisons in England and Wales are foreign nationals.
While the average cost of a prison was £60,018, the annual bill for incarcerating foreign criminals totaled £629,408,766. Great Britain News. But that amount is expected to fall under Labour’s new deportation bill for fraudsters. This sum, up 77% from £335 million a decade ago, could cover the costs of around 16,500 police officers or around 15,000 NHS nurses.
Likewise, the number of foreign nationals behind British bars has also increased and now accounts for 12% of the prison population. Ten years ago this figure was 11 percent.
The most common nationalities behind bars are Albanian (969), followed by Irish (718) and Polish (683).
Romanians (674) and Indians (396) make up the fourth and fifth largest proportion of foreign criminals in the UK.
Meanwhile, last year’s data shows that almost one in four foreign criminals were sentenced to more than ten years in prison.
Home Office ministers are seeking to tighten deportation rules and, under changes announced last year, prisoners who do not have a legal right to remain in the UK are set to be deported after serving just 30% of their sentence in a bid to ease pressure on prisons and cut the cost for taxpayers.
Previously, under the Conservative Government, these people had to serve 50 per cent of the sentence before being repatriated.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “The government’s record of deporting foreign national criminals speaks for itself, with more than 8,700 people deported since July 2024, a 32% increase on the previous 19 months.
“While we restore order and control at our borders, we are also changing the law so that foreign prisoners can be deported earlier than ever.”
