They were released at an average of 41 a month after Mr Clarke knew of the problem in August last year, compared with 14 a month in the preceding three years.

In further damaging revelations it emerged that the Prime Minister was told only yesterday morning that 288 had been released since last August. In addition, police received the first names of freed prisoners only yesterday.

The disclosures suggest that Mr Clarke did not check what was happening and that he has not got a grip on a notoriously difficult department to run.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “This is yet another example of his department’s failure and incompetence. There is no excuse for the Home Secretary not knowing about this.”

In fact, warnings over the gathering foreign national prisoner crisis have been issued for many years.

Anne Owers, Chief Inspector of Prisons, publicly alerted the Home Office, then headed by David Blunkett, of the growing number of foreign nationals in jails in December 2002. “There is an increasing number of foreign nationals in UK prisons,” she said. “As yet, policies and practices are not sufficiently developed.”

Ms Owers warned the Home Secretary of the time and his Prisons Minister, Hilary Benn: “We have found that some prisons do not know how many they hold, or understand their needs . . . there is a great deal of confusion . . . We have found very patchy support and procedures in place to address their particular concerns and ensure that they are able to return home speedily, or can be transferred out of prison, following the end of sentence.”

If that warning to Mr Blunkett and Mr Benn was not clear enough, Ms Owers repeated it again in a further report in January 2004. By then Mr Benn been replaced as Prisons Minister by Paul Goggins.

Ms Owers spoke of “an institutional blind spot for foreign nationals”. She said that many jails did not know how many they held and then explicitly alerted the Government to failings in the Immigration Service, then headed by Bill Jeffrey, who is now Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence.

Ms Owers said that the lack of information in prisons on foreign nationals “was not helped by the dilatory attitude of the Immigration Service, which, unless pressed, was not monitoring those liable to deportation and making arrangements for this to take place as soon as sentence had expired.”

Ms Owers again flagged up the problem in January 2005, a month after Charles Clarke became Home Secretary. “In spite of the growing number of foreign national prisoners, there is still no national strategy . . . detention often appeared to be the result of delays in instituting deportation action,” she said.

Throughout the period of her warnings, the man in charge of the department was Sir John Gieve, who admitted that it had lost control of asylum and immigration.

Sir John, now a Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, was also in charge of the department when it lost control of its finances, leading the National Audit Office to refuse to give its seal of approval to the department’s flawed cash records.

ON WHOSE WATCH DID IT HAPPEN

JACK STRAW was Home Secretary from May 1997 to June 2001

• 24 foreign prisoners were released without being considered for deportation between 1999 and 2001

  DAVID BLUNKETT was Home Secretary from June 2001 to December 2004

  CHARLES CLARKE has been Home Secretary since December 2004

• 288 prisoners have been released since last year, although the problem came to light in August

Times Recommends

• Over and out: former para on why he quit
• What links a cheesy musical and a pickled cow?
• EU rediscovers taste for bendy cucumbers