Ministers have refused to say how many foreign prisoners who are eligible for deportation remain in Britain because of human rights claims, and say they have no plans to publish the figure.
The Home Office says counting them would cost too much. Yet ministers are asking Parliament to rewrite the rules on those claims, using figures that stop in 2021.
In written answers published on Monday, the Lords minister Lord Collins of Highbury said the information ‘is not currently available from published statistics’ and could only be collated and verified ‘at a disproportionate cost’. He added: ‘We currently do not have plans to publish the information requested.’
The questions came from the Conservative peer Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest. She asked how many deportable foreign prisoners remain here because of claims under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for private and family life, and how many because of human rights claims more widely. She also asked when the figures would be published and what was being done to make them publishable. All five questions received the same reply.
That answer sits awkwardly with what the Government told the Lords last month. On 15 October the justice minister Lord Lemos said the information ‘is held by the Home Office but is not in a reportable format for data extraction purposes’. Pressed to make it publishable, he agreed to ask the Home Office again, but added: ‘I doubt that the position is going to change.’ He said the Government would not put out ‘data that is misleading or unreliable’.
Baroness Monckton asked in the chamber why the data would be misleading or unreliable. Monday’s written answers did not say.
Ministers are legislating on the issue all the same. The Immigration and Asylum Bill would require decision makers and the courts to consider the public interest in every deportation case involving a foreign offender. It would make clear that deporting foreign criminals ‘will always be appropriate unless the individual impact is out of all proportion to the public interest’.
The Home Office factsheet for that reform, published on 8 October, makes its case with a single statistic. Between April 2016 and November 2021, it says, of 1,011 deportation appeals by foreign offenders allowed on human rights grounds at the First-tier Tribunal, an estimated 70 per cent were allowed solely on Article 8 grounds. It gives nothing more recent.
The Government points to progress on removals. Lord Lemos told peers that returns of foreign national offenders had risen 41 per cent in the Government’s first two years, and that more than 3,000 were removed directly from prison under the early removal scheme between August 2025 and July 2026. New powers due to start in the New Year will allow some offenders on fixed sentences to be deported immediately after sentencing.
Monday’s answers also set out the limits. Where an Article 8 claim is made, the public interest in deportation is weighed against the offender’s private or family life, and ‘sometimes the UK’s current obligations under international law’, including the convention, ‘ultimately prohibit us from returning certain individuals despite their criminality’. In October, Lord Lemos told the House: ‘We are committed to the ECHR.’
The numbers matter for Britain’s prisons. Baroness Monckton told peers that more than 12 per cent of the prison population are foreign nationals, at a time of chronic overcrowding. Each foreign offender who cannot be removed is a cell that cannot be freed and a cost that falls on British taxpayers.
Nor is this a new refusal. In February 2025 the Telegraph reported that the Home Office had refused to say how many deportations had been halted by human rights claims under the convention, also citing the cost of finding the information.
The awkward question for ministers is simple. If the Home Office holds the data, why can it not say how many foreign criminals are being kept here by the claims it is asking Parliament to curb?
Parliament is being asked to change how human rights claims work in deportation cases. The Government says the information exists, but it will not count it, will not say why it would mislead, and has no plans to publish it.
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