The Civil Service is trying to cover up the true scale of migrant crime.
If a social democratic, high-trust country like Denmark can publish data on migrant crime rates, there’s no reason why Britain can’t!
It was sadly predictable that civil servants would seek to block the publication of league tables showing the migrant nationalities with the highest rates of crime. It’s the classic Blob ploy; if the data gives results you don’t like, reject the data.
The proposal,made by the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick and backed by 40 Conservative MPs, was straightforward: Ministers would present an annual report to Parliament detailing the nationality, visa status and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts over the previous year. Mr Jenrick has warned that Britain could be “importing crime” and called for greater transparency to inform policy and public debate.
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When it was announced, the Government was said to have no “ideological concerns” about the plan but was concerned about the practicality of implementing the amendment. Now civil servants have advised that Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, might rule that the amendment is not “in scope” for the Criminal Justice Bill, which is mainly focused on cracking down on crime.
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The good news is that even if the amendment is ruled out, the league table could still go ahead. The Home Office already collects this data, although they don’t organise or publish it. If you attempt to access it through a Freedom of Information request, it will be refused on the grounds that it costs too much to collate. But it would surely be possible for a Minister to access it to aid their decision making – and reveal it to the public.
After all, the data we do have suggests that there are significant disparities between migrant groups. The Ministry of Justice already publishes data on Foreign National Offenders sentenced to imprisonment, with the most recent statistics showing that they represent 12% of the prison population. The most common foreign nationality was Albanian, with the group making up 14% of foreign prisoner population – 1,475 people. While a precise population size is hard to establish due to the large numbers crossing the English Channel on “small boats”, just 140,000 Albanians are estimated to reside in the UK.
That does still suggest that Mr Jenrick is correct that different migrant groups have different impacts on the criminal justice system. A sensible data-driven immigration policy would reduce immigration from nations which are disproportionately involved in crime, with all the attendant costs on the taxpayer.
It could also inform our asylum policy, where there is evidence that organised crime abuses the system. The National Crime Agency has warned that Albanian criminals are coached on how to use modern slavery laws to avoid deportation, while Albanian asylum seekers can be working on cannabis farms within days of arriving illegally in Britain. Without better data in the public sphere it is impossible to quantify the scale of these problems however.
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Yet the civil service remains resolutely opposed to anything which hints that immigration is anything other than an unalloyed good. It is hard to think of any other reason why this data would be withheld; if we are to build migration policies that lead to greater prosperity for all, and create a happier and more cohesive society, why wouldn’t we want to know more about potential migrants, and choose the people most likely to succeed? It may be inconvenient for critics of the amendment, but if a social democratic, high-trust country like Denmark can do this then there is no reason why Britain can’t. DT.
