Foreign criminals being housed in Britain's jails are costing taxpayers almost £630million per year. Around one-in-eight of the total prison population are foreign national offenders, official figures released last week show. Out of the 87,342 prisoners held in British prisons across England and Wales, some 10,487 are foreign nationals.

With the average cost of a prison place at £60,018, the annual bill for incarcerating foreign offenders has reached the total of £629,408,766, according to GB News. However, that sum is expected to drop under new deportation legislation for crooks being introduced by Labour. The sum, which has soared by 77% from £335m a decade ago, could pay for around 16,500 police officers or approximately 15,000 NHS nurses.

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Equally, the number of foreign nationals behind British bars has crept up, now making up 12% of the prison population. A decade ago, this figure was 11%.

The most common nationalities behind bars are Albanian (969), followed by Irish (718) and then Polish (683).

Romanians (674) and Indians (396) make up the fourth and fifth largest portion of Britain's foreign offenders.

Meanwhile almost one in four foreign offenders were handed sentences of more than a decade, last year's data shows.

Home Office ministers have been seeking to crack down on deportation rules and under changes announced last year, prisoners with no legal right to remain in the UK are set to be deported after serving just 30% of their sentence to ease pressure on prisons and cut the cost to the taxpayer.

Previously, under the Tory Government the sentence had to be 50% completed before they were sent back to their home country.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "This Government's record on deporting foreign national offenders speaks for itself with more than 8,700 removed since July 2024 - up 32% on the 19 months prior.

"We are also changing the law so foreign prisoners can be deported earlier than ever before as we restore order and control to our borders."