Half of voters believe Labour is deliberately hiding data on crimes committed by foreign-born convicts, according to a new poll, as the Ministry of Justice fights in court to keep the full figures from being published.

The Find Out Now survey, carried out for the Centre for Migration Control and reported by GB News on 9 November, found that 50 per cent of voters say the government is hiding the information, while 20 per cent disagree. Almost three-quarters of Conservative voters, 74 per cent, and 88 per cent of Reform UK voters share that view.

The poll also found that seven in ten voters want foreign-born criminals to be deported, including 60 per cent of people who voted Labour at the 2024 general election.

The court fight over the figures

At the centre of the row is a Freedom of Information request from the Centre for Migration Control, which asked the Ministry of Justice to publish the total number of convictions in England and Wales from 2018 to 2024, broken down by nationality and by detailed offence type.

The department refused the request, arguing that producing the data would cost too much and that some of the figures could breach the privacy of offenders. The Information Commissioner, the independent watchdog, rejected both arguments and ordered the figures to be released. Rather than publish, the Ministry of Justice, led by Justice Secretary David Lammy, has appealed to the First-tier Tribunal, where the case is still live.

Robert Bates, the Centre for Migration Control’s director of research, has called the legal fight astonishing and said it raises serious questions about what the government is hiding. Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick has also attacked the refusal to publish, saying successive justice secretaries have refused to release basic information.

What the published figures already show

Some figures have already been released. Department data shows that foreign nationals accounted for about one in seven sex offence convictions in England and Wales, or 14.1 per cent in one recent year, and that Albanians account for the largest number of foreign criminals in the country. What has not been published is the full breakdown by nationality and by specific offence, including rape, murder and arson, for the years 2018 to 2024.

The Ministry of Justice has said it already publishes a range of statistical breakdowns on foreign offenders and keeps its publication options under review. A spokesman has insisted there is no cover-up, but declined to comment further while tribunal proceedings continue.

The Home Office, meanwhile, says nearly 12,000 foreign criminals have been returned in the two years since the last election, a rise of 41 per cent, with returns at their highest level in nearly a decade.

Why the poll matters

The poll measures public opinion, not evidence of concealment, and the question of whether the full data must be released is now for the tribunal to decide. But the findings show how far suspicion has spread: half the public believes the figures are being withheld on purpose, and the issue has become a live political argument about transparency, immigration and crime.

Campaigners for publication argue that voters cannot judge the scale of foreign offending without the full breakdown, and that small numbers could be grouped together to protect privacy, as the Home Office has done before with asylum figures. Ministers argue that the existing published statistics are enough. Until the tribunal rules, the full 2018 to 2024 figures will remain unpublished, and the argument over who is hiding what is likely to continue.