Police failures let foreign criminals avoid deportation

TENS of thousands of foreign nationals could be escaping deportation because police fail to check they are allowed to be in the country when they are arrested.

Failure to check immigration status means crime suspects who have committed serious offences in their own countries can avoid being booted out of the UK.

They could include some who have been involved in killings, sex attacks and drug dealing before coming to Britain.

Some of the foreign crime suspects fool police into not asking the Home Office to carry out checks by insisting they are British citizens.

Police are also less likely to run the names of arrested EU nationals against the watchlist because they do not realise that – despite controversial Brussels free movement rules – they can be kicked out if they have criminal records.

Police requested an immigration status check of the central database in the cases of only 30 per cent of the foreigners arrested outside London. In some parts of the country the figure is as low as 15 per cent.

The worrying situation was uncovered by David Bolt, the independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, in a report commissioned by Theresa May in January when she was still Home Secretary.

He revealed that almost 193,000 foreign nationals – EU and non-EU – were arrested in 2014-15 in England and Wales.

But he said: ‘Not all foreign nationals arrested in the UK by the police were referred to the Home Office for an immigration status check. It was not possible to say how many went unchecked. Identification of these offenders may assist the Home Office in maintaining immigration control.’

If foreign nationals have overstayed their visas, sneaked illegally through Britain’s porous borders or committed crimes abroad, the department’s immigration enforcement teams can take steps to deport them.

But official statistics indicated wild variations across the UK in the level of referrals to the Home Office’s Command and Control Unit, which checks names against its watchlist.

In 2012, three police forces, the Metropolitan Police, West Midlands and West Yorkshire, introduced Operation Nexus, which involves immigration officials working in police stations to run checks on suspects’ immigration status and criminal history. But some officers still prefer to maintain the old methods and deal with local immigration officers.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘We are identifying and removing more foreign criminals from the UK than ever before. As the Home Secretary recently announced, we are also introducing stronger powers to deport criminals and stop them returning to the UK.’