Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has unveiled a plan to send all foreign prisoners abroad to serve their sentences, arguing this would free up enough capacity to scrap Labour's early release scheme entirely. The proposal, announced on Monday, would see foreign nationals with custodial sentences either returned to their home country or transferred to a third nation offering rented prison space if their own country refuses to take them.
Farage said Reform was in discussions with several countries about renting prison capacity, including El Salvador, and confirmed that party chairman Lee Anderson would soon travel there for initial talks. He also floated Estonia and Lithuania as potential Baltic options, adding to the party's previous suggestions of Kosovo and El Salvador.
What exactly is Reform proposing?
Under the plan, foreign criminals given non-custodial sentences would be deported outright, while those serving custodial terms would complete their sentences either in their home country or in a paying third country. Reform argues this would remove foreign nationals from the domestic prison estate entirely, creating room to toughen sentencing laws so that serious offenders serve their full terms rather than being released early.
According to a national broadcaster's report, Reform's broader crime package — combining overseas prison rentals, deportations and new domestic prison building — would create roughly 30,000 prison spaces and cost around £17.4 billion over five years. Of that total, the same report notes that 10,400 spaces would come from returning foreign prisoners to their home countries, while a further 10,000 would come from housing serious offenders overseas. Farage also announced plans to recruit 30,000 additional police officers as part of the same package.
How much would this cost compared with UK prisons?
Farage argued that housing offenders abroad would be significantly cheaper than keeping them in British jails.
To house a foreign national offender in El Salvador will be half the cost of housing a foreign national offender in this country, and will give us more prison spaces.
Speaking to reporters, Farage cited a specific comparison for Estonia, telling journalists that sending an offender there would cost roughly £20,000 a year for the taxpayer, compared with about £50,000 a year in the UK, according to GB News. Reform has not published a formal budget for the scheme, instead pointing to potential savings running into billions of pounds. Other European nations have pursued comparable arrangements: in 2021, Denmark agreed to pay Kosovo an annual fee of £12.8 million over an initial five-year period to rent 300 prison places.
Has Reform addressed human rights concerns?
Farage played down criticism of El Salvador's prison system, which has drawn scrutiny over alleged human rights abuses following the government's crackdown on gang-related crime.
Not all of the prisons are cages.
El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world and is home to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, a large-scale facility that has attracted international attention. Separately, according to , Farage said he had already held discussions with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama about the possibility of returning foreign prisoners to Albania, suggesting the policy extends beyond the countries publicly named so far.
What has Labour said in response?
A Labour spokesperson dismissed the proposals as unworkable in the near term, arguing that arranging overseas prison rentals would take years and would not address the immediate pressures facing the system.
Nigel Farage knows full well that renting prison places overseas would take years to arrange and does nothing to tackle the pressures we face now.
While Reform chase headlines, this Labour government is getting on with the job - building 14,000 additional prison places and removing foreign criminals at pace.
The spokesperson added that almost 10,000 foreign criminals have been removed since the last election, a 36% increase on the previous 21 months.
How does this fit into the wider prisons row?
The announcement comes as the government faces mounting pressure over its early release scheme, due to begin in October in England and Wales, when the first batch of a total 5,000 prisoners will be freed. Last week, Andy Burnham said prisoners convicted of rape, grooming and serious child sex offences would be excluded from the scheme, while acknowledging he wanted to exclude more but that prison overcrowding prevented this. Under current plans, two of PC Andrew Harper's killers, Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, remain eligible to be released halfway through their 13-year sentences after being convicted of manslaughter in 2020, a case that has drawn a petition signed by more than 850,000 people calling for them to remain in prison. On Monday, Downing Street said it was not possible to exempt individual offenders convicted of manslaughter from the scheme.
The row over early releases has also drawn in opposition parties beyond Reform. Kemi Badenoch has separately urged Andy Burnham to introduce emergency legislation to halt the early release of around 700 prisoners under the paused scheme, underscoring the cross-party pressure Labour faces on the issue.
What are the current prison population figures?
There were 10,134 foreign nationals held in custody in England and Wales at the end of June, accounting for 12% of the total prison population. Reform claims its proposals would free up more than 10,000 prison spaces, though its policy document does not clarify whether this figure includes remand prisoners awaiting trial, who make up roughly a third of that total. Neither Farage nor Reform's home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf addressed this gap when pressed at Monday's press conference.
The prison population in England and Wales stood at 86,495 on 3 August 2026, representing 97% of usable capacity, and the Ministry of Justice has warned that population will overtake capacity as early as this November. Deportation currently applies automatically to foreign nationals sentenced to at least 12 months, subject to an appeals process. Home Office figures show 5,858 foreign national offenders were returned in the year ending March 2026, up 13% on the previous year and the highest total since 2017. A further 15 countries were added last year to the Home Office's
