The Home Office has rejected a request for information on how many people have been deported following arrests in Reading.

A number of cases have been reported in the town where business owners have been hit with hefty fines for employing staff who have illegally entered the UK, those who have overstayed a valid VIS, or those who have no right to work in the UK.

Recently, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) asked the Home Office how many people have been deported from the UK following arrests in Reading during the past two years.

The Home Office has rejected the Freedom of Information request, stating costs would be too much to compile the data - according to an Immigration Enforcement Secretariat.

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The information officer explained: "We would need to manually examine the cases of all those individuals who were removed from the UK during either of the periods specified to see if they had been arrested in Reading (or the surrounding area).

"The information is not held centrally on Home Office systems and could only be obtained by manually examining individual case records. Such information would be recorded in free text fields in the individual’s case record."

The LDRS asked for the information through a Freedom of Information (FoI) request, with the cost limit for FoI's set at £600, based on work carried out at a rate of £325 per hour.

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The LDRS also asked the Home Office for deportation statistics for the same periods from the nearest deportation centre, which in Berkshire is the Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre near Slough.

Deportation occurs when a person  is removed from the UK if they have been
convicted of a criminal offence resulting in a prison sentence of 12 months or longer, or their presence in the UK is otherwise not conducive to the public good.

Removal occurs simply when a person no longer has any legal right to be in the UK, and when their appeal rights have been exhausted.

Data from the Home Office shows that there were 1,901 entries into the Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre in 2022, down by 214 on 2021, when there were 2,115 entries to the centre.

However, it is unclear how many people were actually removed due to appeals and some people entering a detention centre multiple times.