Alex has announced that foreign national shoplifters, thieves and drug dealers are to be deported rather than prosecuted.
Alex told The Telegraph that lower level foreign offenders will rapidly removed from the country using “conditional cautions” under which they will be expelled and banned from returning to Britain.
Out of a total of 88,000 prisoners behind bars in England and Wales, more than 10,000 of them are not from the UK.
Alex revealed that he had written to Poland and Romania to establish a deal similar to one the UK signed with Albania last July, where the Balkan state agreed to start taking back some of its prisoners.
He said that the cost to the taxpayer to hold foreign prisoners, £47,000 per year per criminal, left him with an 'intense frustration' and led him to push for the plans.
Alex said:
“There are some cases where it’s absolutely right that you are going to want to go through the criminal justice process to ensure that that person is properly punished.
“But there will be other cases where actually it’s in the public interest to simply get them out of the country.”