The number of crimes committed by foreign criminals is ‘sizeable and increasing’, a minister warned yesterday.

Police Minister Damian Green made the warning as he promised new action to clamp down on offenders from overseas.

He pointed to figures showing more than 74,000 foreign national offenders were arrested in London in a single year.

David Cameron has personally pledged to deport more foreign criminals from Britain.

But human rights laws, foreign countries’ refusal to accept their own nationals and delays in getting travel documents mean many dangerous offenders are allowed to stay in the country.

In London, the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Nexus has seen immigration officials based in police stations so swift action can be taken when foreign criminals are arrest.

The operation has seen more than 1,000 foreign offenders deported in the past 18 months.

But Mr Green said the scale of offending by foreign nationals outside the capital was ‘less well understood’.

In a speech to Police and Crime Commissioners in London on Tuesday, Mr Green said: ‘The level of crime in England and Wales committed by foreign nationals is sizeable and increasing.

‘In 2011/12 the Metropolitan Police arrested over 74,000 foreign national offenders.

‘The scale of the challenge is less well understood outside London. But we are building that evidence for the rest of the country and will share it as soon as we can to help you deal with the problem more effectively.’

He added: ‘This is not about picking on people because they are not from the UK.

‘Foreign national offenders are first and foremost criminals. The fact that they are not UK nationals provides us with other options for dealing with them.’

In coming months, the Met scheme is set to be extended across the country in an effort to throw out more foreign criminals.

Officials will identify and process foreign suspects as soon as they are arrested, checking whether they are wanted abroad or are here illegally.

Computer records of suspected serious offenders will be marked with a ‘red flag’ to prevent them applying for British nationality while they go through the courts.

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Any reader of this column is usually several years ahead of the crowd. Here, we grasped from the start that the Blair creature was a menace; that the Iraq and Afghan wars were wrong; that joining the euro would be a terrible mistake; that the Tories are both useless and doomed.

We already know that the return of grammar schools –once derided, now increasingly demanded – is the key to education reform.

But perhaps above all we understand that all important Government statistics are fiddled, and that the crime figures are so violently massaged that they bear no relation to reality at all.

Yet fashionable opinion has until recently denied this truth, accusing doubters of ‘moral panic’. Lofty commentators and social scientists have proclaimed a new era of social peace and order.

When normal people, living in the real Britain, complain that this does not seem to be true where they live, they are sneered at as if they were deluded.

But last week, we learned the truth. At an astonishing hearing of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, experts and former police officers lined up to reveal the myriad methods by which the police make crime and disorder disappear from the figures.

At the heart of the trick is this simple aim – to pretend that large numbers of incidents that would once have been crimes are now reclassified so that they don’t appear in the official returns as such.

In short, crime has ‘fallen’ because we have now redefined millions of crimes as non-crimes.

You may still be attacked or robbed. But  it doesn’t count. And this barely touches on another issue, which I plan to deal with shortly, of the vast amount of internet crime that goes entirely unpunished and unrecorded.

The MPs were plainly astonished (for as usual they have not been paying attention). It was clear that the police are under heavy political pressure, from all major parties, to deliver lower crime figures.

This is one of two things our country is good at. Our most successful and fastest-growing branch of agriculture is cannabis farming.

Our most successful industry is the manufacture of lying statistics, showing that everything is fine.

Meanwhile, half the containers leaving British ports are empty, because we make so little and the world does not want it. How long can this go on? Official figures will not be a good guide.

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