£13 Billion per Year: What Immigration Costs the British Taxpayer
Criminal immigrants held in British jails cost the taxpayer £283 million per year, new figures have revealed. This means that the annual total cost of immigration to the British taxpayer is now set at just over £13 billion per year.
According to official figures revealed in Parliament, the bill for keeping foreign prisoners in British jails has been £3.4 billion since 1997. This equates to £283 million per year.
According to figures compiled earlier by Oxford Professor of Demography, David Coleman, and released by independent think tank Migrationwatch, immigration already costs the British taxpayer some £12.8 billion per year.
This figure does not include the cost of housing and feeding foreign prisoners generated by the imprisonment of 11,350 foreign convicts in Britain’s overcrowded jails.
Foreign prisoners have taken up 48 percent of all new jail cells built since 1999, the parliamentary figures also revealed. Some 12,549 new jail cells have been built in the last ten years, while the foreign inmate population grew by 5,962 over the same period.
When the foreign inmate cost is added to Professor Coleman’s figures, the total cost per year ramps up to the £13 billion figure.
This is ten times the National Health Service Deficit and 40 percent more than the foreign aid budget.
The number of foreign criminals has increased by over 110 percent since 1999, compared to an increase of 20 percent in UK offenders. Of the latter number, statistics show further that large numbers are from first or second generation immigrants.
According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, immigrants also send home about £4 billion a year in remittances back to their home countries.
The £4 billion figure is thought to be an underestimate, as it does not include money sent from Britain by unofficial banking channels. In contrast, just £2.3 billion a year flows into the country from British ex-pats working overseas.
A House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs last year found “no evidence” to show that net immigration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.
The latest set of figures show even this to be somewhat of an understatement.
