Britain’s ‘revolving door’ borders were laid bare again today as MailOnline reveals how a career criminal was deported to Romania and banned from the UK only to be arrested on almost the same spot in London weeks later.
Ionut Stoica has been thrown into prison for the next 16 weeks before he will be flown back to his home country for what appears to be at least the third time.
It came as net migration to Britain hit a record 906,000 in the year to June 2023, astonishing figures revealed on Thursday, made worse because the ONS admitted missing 166,000 migrants, making it the new highest year on record.
Scotland Yard has released footage of the moment police rugby tackled Stoica to the floor on Westminster Bridge in early August.
Stoica was spotted close to Big Ben and ran south across the Thames towards the London Eye – but an officer grabbed him and pinned him to the ground.
He was arrested for illegal gambling on the bridge and breaching a deportation order banning him from the UK. After being prosecuted he was deported back to Romania again in September.
But MailOnline can today reveal that brazen Ionut Stoica has snuck into Britain yet again – and was caught loitering on Westminster Bridge last Friday, yards from where he was arrested around 10 weeks earlier.
One Tory MP said that the case showed how Labour is failing to get a grip on who is coming in and out of the UK. ‘This man is now taking the p***. How on earth does he keep getting in?’, he said.
Stoica’s rampant law-breaking and border-jumping emerged on social media.
Sharing a picture of him in the back of a police van, the Met’s Lambeth North-West team said: ‘In the summer we arrested this young chap who was involved in illegal gambling on the bridge. He was also arrested for breaching a deportation order banning him from the UK. He was removed from the UK in September’.
But late last week he was ‘spotted’ back on the bridge – 1,585 miles from Bucharest, where he was dispatched to by the British Government in September.
‘We received information that he may well have made a reappearance in the UK. This information proved to be correct when he was spotted by an officer who was heading into the office, who promptly arrested him for breaching a deportation order again’, the Met said.
Stoica has pleaded guilty to another breach of his deportation order in court and was sentenced to 16 weeks in prison, followed by immediate deportation to Romania when released.
One social media user commented on the case and said: ‘He’ll be back’. Another said the UK has a ‘revolving door’.
While another joked that Stoica was in the UK so often he is ‘surprised he wasn’t given a house’.
The Office for National Statistics admitted that it got its already high net migration numbers for last year wrong, a furious political row broke out.
The ONS confirmed net migration – the difference between those arriving in Britain and those emigrating – rocketed to 906,000 in the year to June 2023 alone, having previously put the figure at 740,000.
When it revised its data covering a three-year period – 2021, 2022 and last year – net migration hit 2,222,000, an addition to the country almost double the size of Birmingham and equivalent to more than 2,000 being added to Britain’s population every day.
ONS statisticians admitted their calculations had previously missed 307,000 people from the figures.
The scale of the numbers prompted angry exchanges in Westminster, with Sir Keir Starmer blaming the Tory government of running ‘a one-nation experiment in open borders’.
The Conservatives retaliated by accusing the Prime Minister of having ‘no credibility’ on the issue after he scrapped the Rwanda
asylum scheme and shelved one of the Tories’ key visa reforms.
Sir Keir said his Government would publish plans ‘imminently’ to bring down the number of people entering the UK, promising to ‘turn the page’. But he refused to commit to putting a cap on numbers.
If migration levels are under-estimated it means ministers and civil servants are unable to properly gauge demand for housing, the NHS, benefits, education and other public services, planning and setting policy accordingly. Tory MP Neil O’Brien said: ‘These figures are just incredible.
‘The changes in this data deliver a further body blow to confidence in our ability to know who is in this country. We need a total overhaul of the way the Home Office and ONS treat migration data.’
Karl Williams, of the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, said: ‘Today’s net migration figures from the ONS are astonishing. The scale of the adjustment raises a serious question mark over the quality of our migration data.’
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage added of the figures: ‘They’re horrendous if you want to get a GP appointment, horrendous if you want to travel around Britain’s motorways, horrendous if you want your kids or grandkids to ever get a foot on to the housing ladder.
‘Horrendous in terms of producing very disjointed societies and communities.’
The ONS admitted its earlier figures had ‘failed to fully adjust’ for large numbers of foreign nationals who stayed in this country when they changed visas. Statisticians had – wrongly – assumed most were going home, and counted them as ‘emigrants’ when, in fact, they remained here.
Sir Keir said a quadrupling of net migration over four years under the Tories had ‘happened by design, not accident’ and amounted to a ‘complete loss of control’.
But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘If Keir Starmer really cared about bringing down net migration, he would not have suspended our increase to the family visa salary threshold and scrapped the Rwanda deterrent. Starmer has no credibility on this issue.’
It has also emerged that British taxpayers are shelling out almost £15million per day to fund the asylum system.
Home Office figures confirm that spending hit £5.38billion in 2023-24 – most of which went on hotels and other accommodation for asylum seekers.