How do the Ministry of Justice and Home Office currently record immigration status in criminal justice data?
Executive summary
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) does not systematically record defendants’ or offenders’ immigration status within its core criminal justice statistics, a limitation repeatedly noted by the Office for National Statistics and independent analysts [1] [2]. The Home Office supplies police-recorded crime data and publishes immigration statistics (including returns and nationality breakdowns of some prison populations), but there is no comprehensive, cross‑system dataset that links immigration or asylum status to prosecutions, convictions or most offender records [1] [3] [2].
1. What the Ministry of Justice records — and what it explicitly does not
The MoJ is the primary custodian of detailed offender, prosecution and sentencing statistics for England and Wales, but its published criminal justice datasets do not include an individual’s immigration or asylum status across the lifecycle of a case; multiple FOI responses and analytical briefings state that immigration status is not collected for convictions or wider offender statistics [1] [2] [4]. Independent commentators and national press have therefore concluded the government’s criminal justice publications cannot tell how many crimes are committed by asylum seekers or by migrants defined by immigration status, because the MoJ’s datasets simply do not contain that variable [5] [2].
2. The Home Office role: police data and immigration statistics
The Home Office is the official source for police recorded crime figures submitted to national statistics, and it compiles and publishes immigration statistics — including asylum applications, small‑boat arrivals, and returns — on its own schedule; these Home Office datasets feed into some analyses of nationality and returns but do not create a joined-up criminal justice record of immigration status at the point of arrest, charge or conviction [1] [3]. The Home Office does, however, publish summaries that link nationality to certain outcomes — for example nationality breakdowns of people serving prison sentences and published returns data — but these are not the same as systematic recording of “immigration status” across case records [6] [3].
3. Where nationality appears in criminal justice outputs
The best‑quality, routinely published data that distinguish UK and non‑UK nationals relate to the prison population rather than to prosecutions or convictions by immigration status: official prison statistics give counts of UK vs non‑UK nationals in custody, and MoJ-derived tables have been used for research on foreign nationals in prison [2]. Other criminal justice bodies such as the CPS and HMCTS use operational management systems and share performance data, but these systems — and the MoJ’s public statistical releases — still do not capture immigration status as a standard demographic field for defendants [7] [4].
4. Consequences for analysis and policy debate
Because immigration status is not routinely recorded in MoJ offender datasets, researchers cannot reliably measure offending or conviction rates by asylum seeker, visa type, duration of residence, or other immigration categories — a limitation flagged by the Migration Observatory and the ONS [2] [1]. That gap shapes public debate: advocates for collecting such data argue it would inform deportation and visa policy (as seen in political proposals), while critics warn about misuse, stigmatisation and operational complexity; both the absence of data and the political appetite to fill it reflect competing agendas [6] [5].
5. Political proposals, reform talk and real‑world practice
There have been formal proposals to change recording practice — for example an amendment from a former immigration minister to require nationality and visa status to be recorded at conviction — and government discussion of enhanced offender management for foreign nationals appears in policy papers and commentary, but as of the latest published sources those proposals have not converted into a comprehensive, operational recording standard across MoJ and Home Office criminal justice datasets [6] [8]. Media narratives sometimes treat nationality or “migrant crime” figures as straightforward, but official sources warn the underlying data do not support that level of granularity [5] [2].
6. What researchers and the public can and cannot do with available data
Researchers must piece together multiple sources — Home Office immigration statistics, MoJ prison nationality breakdowns, police‑recorded crime supplied via the Home Office, and occasional FOI disclosures — while acknowledging the central limitation that immigration status is not a standard field in MoJ offender statistics; for specific enquiries the MoJ directs requests to data.access@Justice.gov.uk [1] [9]. The published Justice Data portal and MoJ publications provide many performance and offender metrics, but they do not close the evidence gap on immigration status across the criminal justice pathway [10] [11] [4].