Immigration, asylum and crime
What is published, what is not, and why the question is harder than it sounds.
The short answer
If you want to know whether asylum seekers commit more or less crime than anyone else in the UK, the published national statistics cannot tell you. That is not a hedge and it is not a refusal: the series that would answer it does not exist. Anyone quoting a figure that does answer it is either using a different country’s data, a local or partial dataset that cannot be generalised, or a calculation with a denominator they have chosen themselves.
Why this page exists
A reader told us they had looked for crime figures relating to asylum seekers and immigration and could not find any, and wondered whether that was because none existed. They were right. This page sets out what is published, what is not, and why the two are further apart than they look.
Contested ground, and an absence that gets used
This is contested ground, and the absence of data gets used by all sides — to imply that something is being hidden, or that a concern is baseless. Neither follows. A statistic that is not collected supports no conclusion in either direction, and the reason this page states the gap so plainly is that a gap is easier to exploit when nobody names it.
What is published
The Ministry of Justice publishes the prison population by nationality group each quarter. As at 30 June 2026 the figures were:
85,858
People in prison
30 June 2026, England and Wales
75,494
British nationals
By nationality recorded, not by place of birth
10,134
Foreign nationals
11.8% of the prison population
Nationality as recorded in the prison record. It is not a record of immigration status, and the three groups below are the only split published.
- British nationals75,494 (87.9%)
- Foreign nationals10,134 (11.8%)
- Nationality not recorded230 (0.3%)
This is a proportion of the prison population, not a rate. It cannot be compared with any share of the resident population, because the two are counted on different bases and no denominator published here would make that comparison valid.
Source: Ministry of Justice, Offender management statistics quarterly: January to March 2026, Table 1.Q.9 and Table 1.Q.11, prison population by nationality group.
View as table
| Category | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| British nationals | 75,494 | 87.9% |
| Foreign nationals | 10,134 | 11.8% |
| Nationality not recorded | 230 | 0.3% |
The published sources, in full
Prison population by nationality group and by individual nationality
Ministry of Justice, quarterly
British, foreign national and not recorded, with a breakdown by individual nationality, custody type and prison. England and Wales.
Source ↗Foreign national offenders returned from the UK
Home Office, quarterly, in immigration system statistics
Counts of returns, including of people who have served custodial sentences. A removals statistic, not an offending one.
Source ↗Crime experienced and reported
Office for National Statistics, Crime Survey for England and Wales
Victim-based estimates of crime, and police recorded crime. Neither records the immigration status of a suspect or an offender.
Source ↗
Why that does not answer the question
What people want to know
- Do asylum seekers commit more or less crime than others?
- Do people who arrived recently offend more than people who did not?
- Does a particular route of arrival predict a later conviction?
What is actually recorded
- What passport someone in prison holds
- How many people are in custody on one day
- How many foreign national offenders were returned
- 1
Nationality is not immigration status, and not asylum status.
The prison record captures what passport someone holds. It does not capture how they came to be in the UK or what permission they have. A foreign national in prison may have lived here since childhood with settled status, arrived last year on a skilled worker visa, be a student, be an asylum seeker with a live claim, be a refugee with leave to remain, or have no leave at all. All of them appear in one figure. Nothing published separates them, so no statement about asylum seekers can be derived from it.
- 2
Prison population is not a crime rate.
It is a stock — the number of people in custody on one day — not a flow of offences. It is shaped by sentence lengths, by remand decisions, and by how long people have already served, as much as by how many offences were committed. It also excludes everyone convicted of an offence that did not carry a custodial sentence, everyone cautioned, and every offence that was never charged. Two populations with identical offending can produce different prison numbers if their offences, or their sentences, differ.
- 3
There is no denominator that would make a rate meaningful.
A rate needs a population to divide by. The prison figures cover England and Wales; population estimates by nationality come from different sources on different geographies with their own uncertainty, and the population of people with a given immigration status at a given moment is not known precisely at all. Dividing one by the other produces a number that looks like a rate and is not one. This page therefore computes no rate, and readers should be wary of any source that does without showing its denominator.
No rate appears anywhere on this page
Every one of the three points above is enough on its own to make a rate misleading, and a rate is the thing most likely to be lifted out of context. This page publishes counts with their definitions and computes no rate at all.
What is not published
No national series exists for any of these
- Offending or conviction rates by immigration status.
- Offending or conviction rates by asylum status.
- Crime committed by people accommodated in asylum accommodation, as a national series.
- Any national series linking a person’s route of arrival to a subsequent criminal record.
- A prison population figure broken down by immigration status rather than nationality.
Why the collections work this way
Criminal justice records capture nationality because it is asked at booking into custody and matters for consular notification and for deportation decisions. Immigration status is held by the Home Office in a separate system, for a different purpose, and the two are not routinely linked and published as a statistical series. That is a description of how the collections are built, not a claim about why — no published source sets out a rationale, and this page does not invent one.
If you are shown a figure that does answer it
Figures occasionally circulate from a single police force, a single local authority, or a response to a freedom of information request. Those can be accurate for what they cover and still not support a national claim: they cover one area, often one year, usually with no comparable denominator, and they are not designed to be generalised. Where such a figure is quoted, the questions worth asking are what population it covers, what it is being divided by, and whether the same calculation has been done for any comparison group.
Prison figures are England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate prison services and publish their own statistics, on their own definitions.
Last verified 2026-08-17. Data: Ministry of Justice, Offender management statistics quarterly: January to March 2026.
Related
- In this sectionImmigrationThe numbers on migration to and from the UK.
- In this sectionWhat immigration contributesAn OBR-based scenario for the public finances, and what cannot be calculated.
- Leaves this sectionCrime and safetyRecorded crime, prosecutions, prisons and police numbers.
- Leaves this sectionHow we workThe rules this site applies to contested subjects.