Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick has submitted an amendment to the UK government’s Criminal Justice Bill, proposing the recording of nationality, immigration, and visa status for all criminals convicted in England and Wales. The data would be collated annually and would assist in informing deportation and visa policies by helping to identify higher risk nationalities. Jenrick, who resigned from his post in December over the prime minister’s Rwanda deportation plan, suggested that having such information would enable the interrogation of statistics on crime, making policy choices possible. Foreign nationals convicted of crimes in the UK are already subject to visa restrictions.
The proposal has been backed by 25 MPs, including Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Sir Robert Buckland. It would become part of government policy if backed by a majority of MPs in a vote in the Commons. The amendment would be one of dozens voted on as the bill proceeds through Parliament. A government source confirmed that the amendment would be considered.
According to Jenrick, the proposal has been prompted by his awareness as immigration minister of the growing evidence that the UK was importing crime, particularly violent crime, sexual assaults, and drug production. Jenrick cited the National Crime Agency’s concern over a significant proportion of the UK’s drug trade being fuelled by Albanian drug production with nationality already taken into account when assessing visa applications as part of a risk-based strategy. Having data on criminality as well would help in applying greater scrutiny to higher-risk nationalities, he said.
Although the nationalities of criminals are not routinely recorded, the Home Office regularly publishes the nationalities of those convicted serving prison sentences; at the end of June 2023, there were 10,321 foreign nationals in prison in England and Wales. Just over half of these were European nationals, with the most common nationalities being Albanian, Polish, Romanian, Irish, and Jamaican. Denmark and some US states already practise similar recording of criminality data, Jenrick said, emphasising the importance of understanding immigration problems for the UK
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