£8 million scheme to send 200 Albanian prisoners back to their home has seen 13 go in three years
An £8million prisoner transfer scheme intended to send 200 Albanian criminals home from British jails has resulted in only 13 transfers in three years, raising questions about its value for money and effectiveness. The 2023 agreement was designed to ease overcrowding and reduce the cost to taxpayers of housing foreign nationals, since Albanians make up the largest foreign group in UK prisons at around 1,000 inmates, roughly 10 per cent of the non-British prison population; however, delays in Albania's judicial system, including judges failing to sign off on necessary paperwork, have created a backlog that has stalled the scheme.
Britain agreed to pay Albania £8million over two years to refurbish its prisons to support the deal, with further per-prisoner payments made based on time served. Housing a prisoner in the UK costs roughly £56,000 a year, meaning long-serving Albanian murderers such as Erland Spahiu and Ali Qazimaj, both jailed for 35 years, would each cost taxpayers at least £2million over their sentences. High-profile cases eligible for transfer include Sabina Nessa's killer Koci Selamaj, while drug trafficker Klodjan Copja was among the first successfully returned. The government says deportations overall are at a near-decade high, with more than 11,700 foreign offenders removed since July 2024.
- Only 13 of 200 targeted Albanian prisoners transferred home in three years
- Albanian judicial delays and unsigned paperwork are stalling the £8m scheme
- UK still spending heavily housing long-term Albanian offenders, some costing £2m+
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Britain's Albanian prisoner transfer scheme was set up in 2023 with the aim of returning Albanian nationals serving sentences in England and Wales to complete them in prisons back home. Albanians are the largest single group of foreign offenders in the UK prison system, numbering around 1,000, and the idea was that sending them home would ease overcrowding and cut the cost to British taxpayers of housing them.
Under the deal, the UK agreed to pay Albania £8million over two years to help improve its prisons, plus additional sums linked to how long each transferred prisoner had left to serve. The scheme covers a range of offenders, including those convicted of serious crimes such as murder and drug trafficking, some of whom are serving very long sentences that are costly to the public purse.
The scheme sits within the wider, ongoing debate in Britain about prison overcrowding and the removal of foreign national offenders, an issue the government has repeatedly pointed to when citing its record on deportations.
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The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Supporters of the scheme argue that it addresses a genuine and costly problem: with Albanians forming the largest foreign national group in British prisons, returning convicted criminals to serve out their sentences at home is a sensible use of taxpayer money, potentially saving millions of pounds per long-term prisoner in future years. They point out that bilateral judicial cooperation agreements of this kind are inherently slow to bed in, particularly when they depend on reforming and refurbishing another country's prison infrastructure and navigating a foreign legal system's own procedural requirements. On this view, the low transfer numbers so far reflect early-stage teething problems and bureaucratic delays on the Albanian side rather than a flawed policy, and continued diplomatic pressure and investment could still deliver strong long-term value as the backlog clears.
The case against
Critics argue that spending £8million upfront, with only 13 of a promised 200 transfers completed in three years, represents poor value for money and calls into question whether the scheme was ever realistically deliverable. They contend that relying on another country's judiciary to process paperwork introduces an unacceptable degree of uncertainty into a policy sold to the public on the basis of clear cost savings and reduced prison overcrowding. From this perspective, taxpayers are effectively subsidising Albanian prison refurbishment while continuing to bear the full cost of housing the very prisoners the scheme was meant to remove, and the government should be more transparent about timelines, renegotiate the terms, or reconsider the scheme's viability rather than presenting it as a success in progress.