Ellie Craven is a senior researcher at Onward.
It is no secret that there is a prison crisis in this country.
Prisons in England and Wales have been operating at dangerous levels for several years now. But this October our prisons were 98 per cent full – that leaves just over 1,800 places in the prison estate. But how did we get here and, more importantly, what can be done? Onward’s new report The Cost of Strangers dives into this emergency.
There has been burdensome pressure on the courts with a backlog in cases increasing before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic intensified this. The most serious cases being heard in the Crown Court had already increased by 23 per cent from 33,290 cases in March 2019 to 41,045 in March 2020 as the pandemic began. The most recent figures show that by the end of March 2025, the Crown Court backlog reached 76,957 – an 11 per cent increase on March 2024.
This means that there is now a larger population being held in custody on remand awaiting trial.
Tougher and longer sentences have also been rising since 2023: in 2024 prisoners with sentences of four or more years made up 72 per cent of the prison population, compared to just 54 per cent in 2009.
And in the last decade there has been a significant increase in the number of people recalled to prison after breaking the terms of their parole. Ministry of Justice data shows that between January and March 2025, there were 13,296 prisoner releases and 10,101 recalls – this means that for every four people released in the first quarter of 2025, a staggering three were recalled.
To alleviate this crisis, the Government has resorted to a slew of early releases. At the same time, the number of erroneous early releases has increased at a staggering rate. Coincidence? I think not – and neither does the former Chief Inspector of Prisons. A light has been shone on the danger of this increased volume of mistaken releases in the last month with the release of two high-profile foreign national sex offenders.
Early releases are also not popular with the public. If you remove London, over 50 per cent of the country disapproves of early releases. Some areas like the South West, North East and East Anglia register nearly 70 per cent disapproval. And with individual prisons acrossthe country between 95 per cent and 100 per cent full, early releases could become more and more frequent.
But there is a clear group of inmates that should not be in our prisons: foreign national offenders (FNOs). Britain is not open to business for crime. But with English and Welsh prisons housing 10,800 foreign national offenders, one could be forgiven for thinking it is. That’s 12 per cent of our prisons taken up by non-British offenders.
What’s more, Onward analysis reveals that FNOs have cost the taxpayer over £3.2 billion since 2019 alone. And under this Labour Government, the taxpayer bill for FNOs is at an all-time high of £643 million in the last year – that’s over 50 per cent more than 2019.
To put this into perspective, that’s the same as the salary of over 20,000 new nurses or over 19,000 new prison officers.
For the integrity of our justice system, immigration system and tax system we need to send a clear message: if you come to this country and commit crime, you cannot stay. On average though, only 5,500 FNOs a year were removed from the UK between 2010 and 2019 – that’s merely around half of the annual FNO population.
So what’s going wrong?
Currently, offenders can be removed from this country through various means including deportation; the early removal scheme; the facilitated return scheme; prisoner transfer agreements; and the tariff-expired removal scheme.
But the ECHR is getting in the way of deportation. Between 2016 and 2021, nearly 75 per cent of successful appeals against deportation by FNOs that were allowed on a human rights basis were on Article 8 grounds alone. The Home Secretary recently announced the Government will “force judges” to prioritise public safety over the rights of FNOs.
There are two things wrong with this.
Firstly, these measures don’t go far enough. Considerations to family or private life should not be given any material weight after the commission of the offence unless exceptional circumstances exist. And secondly, while Parliament can pass legislation instructing courts how to weight Article 8 rights relative to public safety, the courts can declare this incompatible with ECHR rights.
So, beyond taking the UK out of the ECHR – which this Labour Government has established it won’t do – what more should the Government do to accelerate the deportation of FNOs? Britain expects migrants to abide by our laws and we should not tolerate it when that does not happen.
Onward’s report calls for further action, and fast: perpetrators of lower level crimes should be deported before they are convicted, the removal of the minimum requirement for the early removal scheme should be accelerated, the ‘deport now, appeal later’ policy should be expanded, and the Government should remove new visas for countries that are not cooperating with the UK to take back their offenders.
In taking these steps, the Government can increase the removal of FNOs and take pressure off our prisons.
