How much do foreign criminals cost the UK?

According to a report, up to £1 billion of public money was spent last year on managing and removing foreign criminals in the UK.

17:49 22 October 2014

A recent report released by National Audit Office (NAO) says that up to £1 billion was spent last year on managing and removing foreign criminals in the United Kingdom. Prime Minister David Cameron reacted to the damning report saying “the buck stops with me.”

"We're making progress, the buck does stop with me but I wouldn't mind a bit of cross-party support for the actions we need to take," the Prime Minister said.

He added: "I think the NAO has actually produced a very good report into what is a difficult issue to get right. We've deported 22,000 foreign national offenders since I've become Prime Minister.

"The report is very clear that since 2013 for the first time we've got a proper cross-government strategy to deal with this.

"It also goes into quite a lot of detail about how there are still too many obstacles in the way in terms of human rights legislation that we need to change."

NAO said that foreign prisoners have increased from 10,231 to 10,649 since 2006. However, the numbers of removals have dropped from 5,613 to 5,097.