Foreign criminals in Britain's jails cost taxpayers almost £630 MILLION per year

Foreign criminals housed in Britain's jails are costing taxpayers almost £630million per year, new analysis by GB News has revealed.

Around one-in-eight of the total prison population are foreign national offenders, official figures released last week show.

Out of the 87,342 prisoners held in British prisons across England and Wales, some 10,487 are foreign nationals.

With the average cost of a prison place at £60,018, the annual bill for incarcerating foreign offenders has reached the total of £629,408,766.

The sum could pay for around 16,500 police officers or approximately 15,000 NHS nurses, GB News found.

The cost of running a prison has also witnessed a 65 per cent surge over the past decade.

Around 10 years ago, the average annual cost per inmate stood at £36,259.

As a result, the overall cost to hardworking Britons to house foreign offenders has climbed by 77 per cent over the same period, a jump from roughly £355million a decade ago.

Equally, the number of foreign nationals behind British bars has crept up, now making up 12 per cent of the prison population.

A decade ago, this figure was 11 per cent.

The most common nationalities behind bars are Albanian (969), followed by Irish (718) and then Polish (683).

Romanians (674) and Indians (396) make up the fourth and fifth largest portion of Britain's foreign offenders.

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Separate data released last year revealed that almost one in four foreign offenders were handed sentences of more than a decade.

Labour has been hit with opposition parties vowing to toughen up deportation rules, with Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage pledging to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The controversial document has paved the way for many foreign criminals to remain in Britain under Article 3, which prohibits torture, and Article 8, which protects family rights.

While Labour has refused to leave the widely-condemned convention, Home Office ministers have been seeking to crack down on deportation rules.

Under changes announced last year, prisoners with no legal right to remain in the UK are set to be deported after serving just 30 per cent of their sentence to ease pressure on prisons and cut the cost to the taxpayer.

Previously, the sentence had to be 50 per cent completed before they were sent back to their home country.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "This Government’s record on deporting foreign national offenders speaks for itself with more than 8,700 removed since July 2024 – up 32 per cent on the 19 months prior.

"We are also changing the law so foreign prisoners can be deported earlier than ever before as we restore order and control to our borders."