The arrests collection held by the Home Office covers arrests for recorded crime (notifiable offences) only, broken down at a main offence group level, covering categories such as violence against the person, sexual offences, drug offences and robbery. Data on arrests for immigration, passport and knife crime offences are not available as it is not possible to identify specific offences from within the offence groups.
In 2007-08 (latest available) there were 104,532 persons arrested for drug offences in England and Wales.
The records held by the UK Border Agency for immigration offenders arrested nationally for immigration related offences, including passport and documentation offences, show that 10,750 offenders were arrested in 2007-08. These UK Border Agency figures do not constitute part of National Statistics as they are based on internal management information. The information has not been quality assured under National Statistics protocols, should be treated as provisional and is subject to change.
The UK Border Agency adopts an intelligence and target led approach to operations and our top priority has been to protect the public and remove from the UK the most harmful people first. Based on UK Border Agency management information 5,395 foreign national prisoners were removed in 2008—exceeding our target of 5,000.