What New UK Data Tells Us About The Crimes Committed By Migrant Deportees and Foreigners
Photo by Bennie Bates via Unsplash.
Recent events in the UK, such as the horrific knife attack by a Sudanese refugee in Belfast this June and the murder of the student Henry Nowak in Southampton last December and subsequent sentencing of his Sikh attacker, have heightened tensions over immigration and also led to inflammatory statements by some politicians and riots on the streets of British towns. New data published by the Home Office will help better inform discussion of migrant criminality.
Riots in August 2024 were provoked by false claims circulated by the Far Right that the murderer of three young girls in Southport was a Muslim asylum seeker and which led to attacks on a mosque and the burning of local hotels used to house people who had claimed asylum. In 2025, there was further disorder linked to hotels used to house people seeking asylum, particularly focused on Epping, an area just North East of London, but which also spread to other cities. This summer, comments from political actors have included an unprecedented intervention from U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who blamed the murder of Nowak on “the mass invasion of migrants.” Other attempts to link the latest violent incidents to immigration included comments from the Reform UK party's Nigel Farage and the anti-immigration agitator Tommy Robinson, who spoke about rioters setting alight a house used to accommodate asylum seekers and which was housing “unvetted fighting age foreign men” (although neither the attacker in Belfast or Henry Nowak's killer were claiming asylum).
Whilst there have of course been examples of crimes committed by people seeking asylum, in all of these recent cases none of those whose crimes had provoked the disorder or political comment were in the process of claiming asylum. Extreme crimes are relatively rare, and the actions of a small number of deranged individuals are in no way representative of people from a migrant background, but this has not stopped troublemakers trying to make the link with immigration in order to provoke public disquiet and garner support.
Now new statistics from the UK Home Office, published for the first time this May, provide better information on the criminality of migrants which should help inform debates on immigration deportations and the foreign criminals dealt with by the Home Office. This data transparency on a highly contentious topic should also be mirrored in other countries currently concerned about having an honest debate about migration and criminality.
The UK publishes more statistics on the operation of its immigration system than any other country in the world. These statistics cover the full breadth of the operation of the UK Immigration system, including visa applications, asylum claims, and grants of citizenship. The latest quarterly statistics were published by the Home Office on 21st May, at the same time as the latest ONS (Office for National Statistics) estimates for net migration, which unsurprisingly dominated the headlines on the day of release (for example, in BBC News: “Migration added 171,000 people to the UK’s population last year, almost half the number seen in 2024, …lowest level since 2012, excluding the Covid pandemic”). The statistics will be updated again at the end of August.
“Extreme crimes are relatively rare, and the actions of a small number of deranged individuals are in no way representative of people from a migrant background, but this has not stopped troublemakers trying to make the link with immigration in order to provoke public disquiet and garner support.”
Home Office statistics include data on the work of Immigration Enforcement, the directorate in the Home Office responsible for enforcing the immigration rules, similar to some of the operations of ICE in the United States. The UK’s Labour Government has been keen to highlight the work of Immigration Enforcement since it won the election in 2024, and in particular the increase in deportation of migrants with no permission to be in the UK, as evidence of the government's control of the border.
Numbers of immigration removals had been increasing following the end of the travel restrictions during the Covid pandemic and continued to grow following the 2024 election of the Labour government, with a total of 39,000 returns from the UK in the year ending March 2026. The Home Office notes that this number includes enforced returns, voluntary returns (which may be prompted by Home Office activity or for other reasons) and also a smaller number of people refused entry at a port of entry and subsequently returned. Of the total, around one quarter (9,700) were the traditional enforced deportations, which include both the Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) and those asylum claimants whose case was rejected as unfounded, and where that decision was upheld by the courts if appealed (as most rejected claims are).
The term may be unfamiliar to some, but the UK uses the term Foreign National Offenders specifically, rather than refer to immigrants or people of migrant background, to emphasise that these are individuals who do not hold a British passport, although may have legal permission to remain or settled status, and so are able to be deported under the Immigration Laws. It is important to distinguish these from British nationals of a migrant background who would hold the same rights as any longer-term resident of the country and would not, under current UK law, be able to be removed.
Photo by Grant Ritchie on Unsplash.
The question of Foreign National Offenders has been of particular political salience over the past year or two, reflecting both historic concerns over people with a migrant background found guilty of serious sexual offences (including for example, those involved in the Asian ‘grooming gangs’ scandal) and as noted a number of cases of serious violent crime by migrants reported by the media. These include cases of child sexual abuse, rape, and organised criminality involved in smuggling of both drugs and people (such as on small boats from Northern France). As a result, there has been a high level of public and political interest in data on foreign national offending, and a large number of parliamentary questions and letters to the Home Office on this topic—many seeking better information, although some also certainly seeking to raise the political temperature.
In response, the Home Office made a public commitment in April 2025 to develop the data it held on Foreign National Offenders, and in its latest quarterly statistics released on 21 May 2026 it has published the first results from this work.
It is infinitely preferable that evidence on this challenging area of immigration management, often avoided by academics, is presented by professional analysts rather than forced out of government through freedom of information requests or parliamentary questions, often from media or politicians with a particular axe to grind. The UK Home Office is to be commended for its work in producing this new data.
Home Office, April 2025:
“There has been heightened interest from Parliamentarians, the media and members of the public in learning more about the number and type of criminal offences committed by foreign nationals in the UK, and about what happens to foreign national offenders (FNOs) after they have been convicted, and after they have completed their sentences. Historically, the data has not always been available in sufficiently robust and reliable form to answer many of the questions raised.”
The UK's Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has for some time already been publishing data on foreign national prisoners in its quarterly Offender Management Statistics. This data includes anyone held in the prison system in England and Wales - so both convicted prisoners as well as those awaiting trial (around 12 percent of the total prison population had not yet gone to trial and a further 6 percent were convicted but unsentenced). However, more than four-fifths of these numbers comprise convicted prisoners found guilty of a crime serious enough to result in imprisonment, so arguably are the best representation of more serious offending.
At the end of March 2026, the MOJ statistics show that there were 10,487 foreign nationals held in prisons in England and Wales—around 12.0 percent of the prison population as a whole, which is a proportion close to the 11.7 percent figure for the share of the working-age population who are foreign nationals. Statistics for Scotland and Northern Ireland are produced by those nation's own statisticians but given their much smaller numbers would not change the national picture much.
It is also important to note, as the Migration Observatory at Oxford has done, that “age is extremely important when examining crime statistics, because young adults are much more likely to commit offences [and] migrants in the UK (as in other high-income countries) are also more likely to be young adults.” Some of those young foreigners arrested and imprisoned may also be non-residents or visitors, which would also imply that the actual proportion of foreigners in prison would be lower than the raw data suggests.
Although crime can be committed by any group, the criminality in the prison population is not evenly spread. The prisons data shows that more than half of foreign prisoners in England and Wales are accounted for by just twelve nationalities, half of which are European. This might seem surprising given that most of the political comment has been directed towards asylum seekers, none of whom are from the EU. The most common foreign nationality is a non-EU European nationality, Albanian (9 percent of the foreign prison population), followed by three EU countries—Irish (6.7 percent), Polish (6.4 percent), and Romanian (6.3 percent)—and then Indian (3.7 percent), Jamaican (3.4 percent), and Iranian (3.3 percent). This mix broadly reflects the numbers in the larger migrant populations in England and Wales or those with an historical connection. Albanians are the main exception, linked in part to the organised gangs known to operate from that country — but even here it is worth noting that the numbers arrested or deported are considerably less than the numbers of legal visitors granted entry.
“It is infinitely preferable that evidence on this challenging area of immigration management, often avoided by academics, is presented by professional analysts rather than forced out of government through freedom of information requests or parliamentary questions, often from media or politicians with a particular axe to grind. The UK Home Office is to be commended for its work in producing this new data.”
MOJ statistics do not provide information on the specific crimes committed but do provide an indication of their relative seriousness. Almost a sixth (15.5 percent) of foreign prisoners had been given a sentence of two years or less, and at the other end of the scale, a similar proportion (16 percent) a life sentence.
Hence, it has been clear from existing data that foreign nationals are not over-represented in criminality or in prisons in England and Wales. They broadly appear at a similar rate to everybody else.
The new Home Office statistics published on 21 May provide additional insight into the foreign national offender population, specifically those who have been removed from the UK. The data now shows that many of those removed have been found guilty of less serious crimes. That does not imply they should have a right to remain in the UK but this knowledge ought to support a richer public debate on the criminality of foreigners.
As for prisons, the Home Office data shows that Albanian nationals were consistently the most common nationality deported over the last five years, accounting for almost a quarter (2,247) of FNO returns in the latest year. Many non-FNO returns of Albanians also occurred following a sharp spike in Albanian small-boat arrivals in 2022 and the UK-Albanian Joint Communiqué signed in December 2022 which aimed to address this.
Although Albanians accounted for almost a quarter of enforced returns in 2025, of the ten most commonly returned nationalities six were from within the European Union, with the next largest numbers from Romania (18 percent) and Poland (8 percent). Almost half the returns of foreign nationals in the last year were EU nationals, a proportion that excludes Albanians. This reflects the numbers who are sentenced to imprisonment but might be surprising in light of the political debate.
Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash.
Political statements can also sometimes imply that deportations include large numbers of murderers and rapists, but the new statistics tell a different story. Of 5,683 foreign offenders returned in 2025, the largest group—41 percent—had been convicted of drug-related offences, and the second largest of theft. Less than 2 percent had been guilty of murder, homicide, or manslaughter; 3.3 percent of rape.
Other data on the sentences of deportees reinforces this picture. Half of those deported for drug offences had served less than two years. Even among the more serious categories, sentences were often shorter than the political rhetoric implies. There were of course some very serious offenders too, with 34 of the 91 homicide returnees having received life or indeterminate sentences, and almost all rapists serving more than four years in prison. Nonetheless, three-quarters of people who were deported in 2025 had been sentenced to four years or less. Only about one in twenty (4.9 percent) had been convicted of murder or rape. The overall picture is a far cry from the dominant impression that is conveyed by some of the commentary.
As we have seen, individual horrific cases can appear to imply that foreign criminality is at the more serious end of a spectrum but these are extreme examples that are not generalisable and do not represent the crimes committed by the vast majority of foreign nationals seen by the justice system. Nor of course are a small criminal minority representative of the general populations of these countries. Politicians also promote the removal of foreign criminals as a success story, yet their statements can be read by the public as an admission that dangerous people are more common amongst migrant populations than is actually the case. The new UK statistics show both that the most serious crimes, such as murder or rape, are rare amongst the migrants being deported, but also that a much broader range of crime by foreign nationals is already being addressed by the authorities.
Furthermore, not only are foreign nationals not disproportionately criminal compared to non-migrants, but most of those removed from the UK were convicted of drug offences or theft, not the murders and rapes often implied. Acknowledging that full picture is what an honest conversation about immigration and crime requires. These new statistics mean that the UK now has a richer evidence base on foreign national offending. Other countries grappling with the same debate have far less data to work with. The new UK statistics show a way forward others should also consider following.
Written by Jon Simmons. Jon Simmons is a member of the Metropolis International Migration Network Executive Committee and was Chief Statistician at the Home Office, overseeing the migration statistics and other migration research, until the end of 2025.
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