Introduction: The numbers that should shame Westminster
Foreign nationals were arrested for around 170,000 alleged offences in England and Wales in just one year, including more than 50,000 violent incidents and over 12,000 sexual offences. Put bluntly, that means overseas citizens are being held on suspicion of about 473 alleged crimes a day on our soil, or around 20 every single hour.
When figures like that break through into the headlines, the response from Westminster is always the same. There are statements of “shock”, promises to “tighten the system”, and a new round of political point‑scoring over whose party is “soft” and whose is “tough”. Meanwhile, the people living with the consequences – the victims, the witnesses, the families, the ordinary English communities – are treated as a backdrop.
This article takes the raw numbers on foreign nationals arrested for 170,000 alleged crimes and asks the question almost no politician wants to touch: how did the people who are paid to protect England allow things to get to this point? And more importantly, what would change if English safety, not party branding, finally came first?
What the 170,000‑plus alleged offences really show
The figures used in the original report were assembled by the Centre for Migration Control, collating data from police forces across England and Wales for the year to March 2025. Their analysis suggests that foreign nationals were implicated in at least 172,889 alleged offences, covering a wide spread of crime categories.
Here is a rough breakdown of those alleged offences:
- Around 50,507 violent incidents involving foreign nationals
- About 12,151 sexual offences
- Some 13,864 drug‑related crimes
- Around 13,400 thefts
- The remaining tens of thousands spread across other categories such as criminal damage and public order offences
Even taken on their own, those numbers would be shocking. They represent tens of thousands of English people assaulted, robbed, or worse by people who, in many cases, only recently arrived here. But what makes the story even more serious are the gaps that surround the data.
First, not all forces provided complete figures. At least five, including Merseyside and Essex, only supplied partial data for the year, meaning the totals are plainly an underestimate. Second, many forces do not consistently record nationality at arrest, which means unknown numbers of foreign‑national offenders are buried inside “British” totals.
So the headline about foreign nationals arrested for 170,000 alleged crimes is almost certainly a floor, not a ceiling. In other words, England is debating this problem using the best data that could be scraped together from an unwilling system, rather than the full truth a serious country would demand.
How British politicians quietly built an unsafe England
It is tempting to treat foreign national crime as a sudden shock, something that “came out of nowhere” in the last few years. That suits parties that have been in power – red or blue – because it suggests they were caught off guard, instead of being the authors of the situation.
The reality is that this is the result of at least 25 years of political decisions:
- Successive governments ramped up mass migration, often insisting it would be “managed” and “controlled”, while border enforcement and removals never kept pace.
- Police forces were never required to record nationality systematically, despite repeated warnings that this made it harder to track trends and target problem areas.
- Removal and deportation systems were allowed to become slow, legally tangled and easily gamed, with more attention paid to courtroom challenges than to English public safety.
Anyone who has lived in England through this period has seen the pattern on the ground. A serious crime hits the local news. The suspect turns out to be a foreign national with a history of previous arrests or convictions, often with open asylum or immigration issues. There are calls for “lessons to be learned”. Then, months later, the same script plays out in a different town.
From a safety point of view, the question is not simply “how many foreign nationals are arrested?”. It is “how many of those individuals had any business still being in England when they committed their latest offence?”. On that point, both Labour and Conservative governments have fallen badly short.
The deportation illusion: Tough talk, soft outcomes
When challenged, Ministers insist that “all foreign national offenders sentenced to prison in the UK are referred for deportation at the earliest opportunity”. On paper that sounds like a firm policy. In practice, it has become another way to hide the gap between what is promised and what is delivered.
There are two major problems.
First, “referred for deportation” is not the same as actually being removed. The process can take years, and in the meantime the offender is often released, reoffends, or disappears into the system. Second, one of the most generous human rights and modern slavery frameworks in Europe allows foreign offenders and their lawyers to tie removal attempts up in court, sometimes for years.
The Centre for Migration Control argues that the UK should treat committing a crime as a foreign national as an aggravating factor that automatically triggers tougher sentences and automatic removal. Instead, foreign national offenders are frequently able to argue that removal would breach their rights, even where the damage to English victims has already been done.
This is where the phrase “How British politicians continue to make England unsafe” stops being rhetoric and becomes a description. It is one thing to take in people who respect the law and contribute. It is quite another to make it hard to remove people who have already abused England’s hospitality in the most serious ways.
Having spoken with people in towns that have seen repeat offending by foreign nationals, the sense is not just anger but betrayal. The feeling is: if the political class will not even protect us from convicted offenders who are not citizens, what exactly are they prepared to defend?
Copying Trump’s ‘red list’? Why Westminster still flinches
The more you look at the numbers behind foreign nationals arrested for 170,000 alleged crimes, the more one question comes up: why isn’t England using every lawful tool available to stop high‑risk individuals coming here in the first place?
The Centre for Migration Control has floated one answer. It argues that the UK should copy Donald Trump’s approach by introducing a red list of countries whose citizens would face visa bans or strict limits where there is a pattern of refusing to take back foreign criminals or where crime rates among their nationals are especially high. That is a hard‑line position, but it reflects a clear logic: if you will not help us remove your criminals, we will stop you sending more.
There are signs that this direction is starting to appear in official policy. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has overseen Britain’s first modern visa restriction on a country that refused to accept illegal migrants back, with warnings that more bans could follow. But at the same time, the political class still resists full transparency on migrant crime.
Senior Conservative MPs have called for detailed annual data showing the nationality, visa status and asylum status of every offender convicted in England and Wales, arguing that league tables of crime rates by nationality would help target policy. In Denmark and some US states, similar practices already exist, and the sky has not fallen in.
Yet attempts to legislate for this level of openness have been dropped or delayed, with bills abandoned when elections loom and human rights concerns raised in Westminster committees. Once again, English public safety comes second to political comfort.
What gets ignored: English victims and broken trust
When you strip away the party lines and technical arguments, the single biggest casualty of this long‑running failure is trust. Trust that the law applies equally. Trust that your safety and your children’s safety matters more than international paperwork. Trust that mistakes are corrected, not repeated.
Behind the headline of foreign nationals arrested for 170,000 alleged crimes are real English lives. There are the victims of violent assaults and sexual offences, who learn – sometimes long after the fact – that the person who attacked them should not have been here in the first place. There are families who discover that the offender had previous convictions abroad that were never properly checked before a visa was issued.
There is also the silent majority who watch this pattern and draw their own conclusions. If you live in an English town where this has happened more than once, you do not need a think‑tank to tell you that something fundamental is broken. When you then hear a Home Office spokesperson say they “do not recognise these figures” and insist that everything is in hand, it sounds like gaslighting, not reassurance.
From conversations in England’s pubs, workplaces and WhatsApp groups, the sense is that people are prepared to be fair, but not to be taken for fools. They know England has always had immigrants and always will. What they cannot accept is a system that is stricter on law‑abiding citizens than on foreign criminals who have already shown they do not care about English law.
What an England‑first safety policy would actually do
If the real problem is political choices, then it can be fixed – with different choices. An England‑first approach to public safety would not be about hating foreigners; it would be about setting non‑negotiable lines and enforcing them consistently.
At minimum, such a policy would include:
- Mandatory nationality recording at arrest and conviction
Every police force in England and Wales should record nationality in every case, without exception, and publish anonymised statistics annually. If a force “cannot” do it, the Home Office should require it as a condition of funding. - Automatic deportation after sentence for serious foreign national offenders
Any non‑citizen convicted of defined serious offences – violent crimes, sexual offences, serious drug trafficking, organised theft and robbery – should face automatic deportation once their sentence is served, with appeals limited to genuine life‑and‑death cases. - Visa conditions and “red list” style controls
Countries that consistently refuse to take back their criminals should face visa suspensions until they comply. Applicants from high‑risk countries could be required to post security bonds, show clean criminal records and accept immediate removal if they offend. - No benefits or extra support for foreign offenders removed from England
The current approach of helping some returnees access housing, business grants or other support in their home countries sends exactly the wrong message. England’s duty is to protect its own people, not to subsidise those who abused its laws. - Serious investment in enforcement, not just rhetoric
None of this works if there are not enough caseworkers, investigators and legal staff to process removals quickly, or if courts keep treating every deportation as a multi‑year seminar on human rights.
The thread running through all of this is simple: being in England as a guest is a privilege, not a right. Abuse that privilege seriously, and you lose it.
Conclusion: England does not need more speeches – it needs protection
Foreign nationals arrested for 170,000 alleged crimes in a single year are not an “unfortunate statistic”. They are the inevitable result of a political class that wanted cheap labour and moral applause, but did not want the hard work and hard choices that come with serious border control and serious justice.
This is not about blaming every migrant or pretending that English‑born criminals do not exist; they do, and they must be dealt with just as firmly. It is about insisting that, at the very least, England should not be a soft touch for foreign offenders who treat this country as somewhere to exploit and then hide behind paperwork.
If this matters to you, there are practical steps you can take. Ask your MP, in writing, whether they support full nationality data on crime, automatic deportation for serious foreign national offenders, and visa bans for countries that refuse to take criminals back. Support independent reporting that puts England’s safety first, not party comfort. And talk openly – with facts, not fear – about what has gone wrong, so the next generation is not handed an even less safe country than the one you grew up in.
FAQs
1. How many crimes are actually committed by foreign nationals in England and Wales?
For the year to March 2025, the Centre for Migration Control identified at least 172,889 alleged offences involving foreign nationals in England and Wales, including more than 50,000 violent incidents and over 12,000 sexual offences. In previous five‑year periods, partial data has suggested foreign nationals were responsible for over 200,000 serious offences, though gaps in reporting mean the true figures are likely higher.
2. Why don’t the police already record nationality in every case?
Some forces do collect nationality at arrest or charge, but it is not consistently mandated nationwide and is sometimes treated as a “nice to have” rather than a requirement. Others claim that extracting and standardising the data would be too costly or complex, which is effectively an admission that the system was never built with this level of accountability in mind.
3. Does this mean most crime in England is committed by foreigners?
No. The majority of offences in England and Wales are still committed by British nationals overall, simply because they make up most of the population. The concern is that foreign nationals appear heavily in certain serious offence categories and that, unlike citizens, they can in principle be removed – yet often are not.
4. What would automatic deportation rules look like in practice?
Automatic deportation would mean that any non‑citizen convicted of a defined serious offence is removed from the UK after serving their sentence, with only narrowly defined exceptions. That would require changing how the ECHR and modern slavery laws are applied, so they protect genuine victims without becoming a shield for convicted criminals.
5. Isn’t talking about migrant crime “far right”?
Labelling any discussion of foreign nationals and crime as “far right” is a convenient way to avoid dealing with real failures and real victims. Mature countries collect honest data, publish it and make policy from it, without smearing everyone who asks for basic safety as an extremist.
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