The number of EU citizens detained for suspected immigration offences has risen by 27% in the past year alone, Home Office figures have revealed.

The statistics emerge after the Home Office admitted mistakenly sending out 100 letters to a number of EU nationals living in the UK, telling them that they had to leave the country or face deportation.



The statistics for the first quarter of 2017, released by the immigration minister, Brandon Lewis, after a parliamentary question, show that 3,699 people were held under the Immigration Act in 2015, which rose by 1,000 in 2016 when Britain voted to leave the EU.

The figure is on course to rise again this year, with the number of EU citizens detained up 16% in the first quarter of 2017 compared with the previous quarter last year.

One key reason behind the increase could be new guidance issued in May 2016 that enabled immigration enforcement teams to deport EU nationals purely on the grounds that they were sleeping rough.

The figures also reveal that the number of EU citizens detained has increased more than sixfold since 2009, before the coalition government came to power, when just 768 EU citizens were detained for immigration offences compared with 4,699 last year.

The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Ed Davey, said the government needed to give a detailed explanation for the rise in the number of detainees, which he said was “shortsighted”.

“The Conservatives seem hellbent on creating a hostile environment for anyone not from the UK,” he said. “These scare tactics should be beneath any civilised government. It risks damaging our reputation abroad and will ultimately serve us badly in the negotiations with the EU.”

A decision to deport a person with permanent residence under EU law can only be made on “serious grounds of public policy or public security”.

Celia Clarke, the director of the campaign group Bail for Immigration Detention (BidUK), said though many EU citizens being detained would be awaiting removal at the end of a custodial sentence, her organisation had noticed a sharp increase in rough sleepers being detained as well as people who had convictions abroad but had sought a new life in the UK.

“People are being regularly picked up for rough sleeping who are either actively working or looking for work – exercising their treaty rights,” she said. “It’s not axiomatic that when you are sleeping rough that you are not working.”

Clarke said at least one of her organisation’s clients had been detained by police after they themselves had been a victim of crime.

“The man was threatened by his landlord and assaulted in the night, but then when he filed a police report, he was detained because he had a conviction in his home country, even though he had been living and working in the UK for two years,” she said.

Clarke said the sharp increase in detentions of EU citizens was hard to explain. “It’s a very murky situation with EU citizens. It feels like the increase cannot be random,” she said.

Last year, the Home Office acquired sensitive information from a database of rough sleepers in London, including their nationality, mental health and gender, collated by outreach workers to support rough sleepers and help policymakers “identify emerging needs,” according to the Observer.

The data shared was stopped only when homeless organisations found out and aired their concerns.