Katie Lam has demanded the removal of every foreign criminal from Britain, arguing there is no justification for their continued presence in the country.
Speaking to GB News, the Shadow Home Office Minister declared “all foreign criminals need to be deported”, and should “serve their sentence in their own country”.
New data from the Ministry of Justice has revealed that one in eight prisoners in England and Wales are foreign criminals.
Out of a total prison population of 87,334 in England and Wales, foreign offenders now make up 12 per cent, a total number of 10,772.
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Katie Lam has called for all foreign criminals to be deported and said they should serve sentences ‘in their own country’
Discussing the data on GB News, Lam insisted that foreign offenders should serve their sentences in their countries of origin rather than remaining in Britain.
“Ultimately, though, what I want is for these people to be as far away from the British people as possible,” Lam stated.
She explained that she and her Shadow Home Office colleagues had proposed changes requiring the expulsion of all individuals who commit crimes in Britain.
“The Conservatives actually in Parliament tried to amend the law, the Borders Bill that the Government passed earlier this year, to say that everybody who commits a crime will need to leave the country,” Lam told GB News.
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Despite Conservative support for these measures, Lam noted that Labour “voted down” the proposed amendments during parliamentary voting.
She highlighted significant obstacles in implementing deportation policies, particularly with nations that resist accepting their citizens back.
“Often the problem is that those agreements need to be enforced, so there are quite a few countries that make it quite difficult to return their foreign national offenders,” Lam explained.
The Conservatives had sought to make this visa restriction mandatory through their proposed amendments.
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Lam told GB News that clearly there is ‘a lot more to do’ to handle foreign criminals in Britain
“We tried to make it a duty for the Home Secretary to say if you’re not going to take back your criminals, we aren’t going to let people from your country keep coming here,” Lam stated.
The shadow minister disclosed that approximately 11,000 foreign national offenders currently remain in the UK, with around 7,000 having received sentences.
Lam acknowledged that previous administrations had failed to resolve the issue adequately: “Lots of these problems, I’m afraid, weren’t previously solved or we wouldn’t have the number of FNAs in the country, foreign national offenders.
“Some of those changes that I just talked about, some of the changes to the law to make it possible to force countries to take their prisoners back, were made by the last Government in response to wanting to solve this problem. But clearly there’s a lot more to do.”