Foreign criminals & deportation

• A Trump-inspired "hostile environment" to drive self-deportation, plus "somewhere in the region of 150,000 to 200,000 forced deportations per year" — clearing what it believes are 1.8–2 million people here illegally in roughly two and a half to three years.
• A cost of £49 billion to £57.6 billion over a pessimistic five-year schedule, including £30 billion for immigration enforcement.
• A 15,000-place privately run detention estate on sites such as former RAF bases.
• Withdrawal from the ECHR, repeal of the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act, removal of every domestic reference to the Refugee Convention, and a "Great Clarification Act" letting Parliament "defeat troublesome court decisions in real time by a simple majority".
• A "Deportation NATO" of Western states: "a lifetime ban from one member state means a lifetime ban from all", with escalating sanctions against countries refusing returns.

• The paper's core estimate of 1.8–2 million unauthorised residents is well above the academic estimate it cites — the Migration Observatory's 2020 range of 800,000 to 1.2 million.
• Its forced-removal target is 15–20 times the current enforced-returns rate, and its detention plan is several times the existing detention estate.
• The New Statesman reported that a researcher thanked in the paper's acknowledgements — a member of Robert Jenrick's team — disputed having contributed to it.

The party's broader platform, which pledges the "most ambitious programme of mass deportations ever seen in Britain", is examined on this site's immigration position page.

• Early Day Motion 63515, "Mass deportation of illegal migrants", tabled 24 April 2025 — signed by 13 MPs, which Mr Lowe himself called symbolically rather than legislatively significant.
• In a Commons debate on 9 December 2025 he disclosed whistleblower figures: 736 foreign criminals released from prison who absconded before deportation, within a total absconder pool of 53,298.
• A written question of his had earlier drawn the answer that "the Home Office does not hold any central record" of how many foreign nationals abscond after being served a deportation order.
• A petition he promoted calling for offshore detention and mass deportation closed with 720,772 signatures and was debated in Westminster Hall on 13 July 2026.

"There are 736 foreign criminals in the total absconder pool for foreign national offenders. … They were meant for deportation but have escaped into the community — 736 of them. … Overall, the total absconder pool stands at 53,298."

"Although important, leaving the ECHR is just one small part of a much wider puzzle."

• Foreign nationals were about 12.4% of the prison population in mid-2025 and around 13% of convictions and cautions in 2024 — but adjusted for their younger, more male age profile, the Migration Observatory found them slightly under-represented in prison relative to British nationals.
• They are over-represented in drug offences and fraud, and under-represented in robbery and violence against the person, with very large variation between nationalities.
• The Observatory's core caveat: "there are no reliable data on convictions or the prison population by immigration status", and population denominators for many nationalities are too uncertain for solid rate comparisons.

In April 2025 the then Home Secretary ordered publication, for the first time, of the nationalities and offences of foreign criminals awaiting deportation, by the end of that year. As of mid-2026 the full pledged dataset had still not appeared, and reports describe an ongoing dispute with the Information Commissioner over the release of nationality-level crime rates.

Until it is published, precise claims about offending rates by nationality — from any side of the argument — run ahead of the official evidence.