THE number of foreign criminals freed from prison without being properly considered for expulsion from Britain is much higher than Charles Clarke has admitted, The Times has learnt.

Hundreds of foreign inmates are believed to have been released on licence in recent years with their papers marked “deportation pending”.

Many, including some violent offenders, have disappeared without trace before any deportation tribunal could take place. This second wave of lost criminals is in addition to the 916 foreign prisoners that the Home Office has admitted it has lost track of since their release.

Out of a list of 80 criminals sent to the Association of Chief Police Officers by the Home Office, 20 did not show up on its computer records, according to BBC2’s Newsnight. These included one murder and three sex offenders.

Some prisoners are released before immigration officials, facing a growing backlog of cases, had time to process their deportation orders. The Home Office is to spend an extra £2.7 million this year tackling prisoner deportation cases.

Judges’ recommendations for deportation, which are overruled in 25 per cent of cases, are to be given greater weight.

The names of the seventy-eight most dangerous people on the Home Office list — including three murderers, nine rapists and five paedophiles — were circulated yesterday to Probation Service officers. A team at the Association of Chief Police Officers is now trawling through the hundreds of others on the list.

Mr Clarke is expected to reveal the results of his department’s initial inquiries in a statement to the Commons today. It is thought that he will say that the most serious offenders have been located but many others remain unaccounted for.

To their numbers should be added foreign prisoners who have been freed before deportation hearings could take place and who have disappeared into illegal migrant communities in London and other large cities.

These people were recommended for deportation but were granted early release on parole and were set free before the criminal casework team at the Home Office could fully assess their cases.

“There is an unknown number of people who have been released into the care of the Probation Service with their licences stamped ‘liable to deportation procedures’,” Harry Fletcher, the assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said.

“A significant proportion abscond in order to avoid being thrown out of the country. If they abscond we tell the Home Office who inform the police, but this is an extremely difficult group of people to trace.”

A deportation assessment is a lengthy process fraught with legal difficulties. The rising number of foreign prisoners has been accompanied by a backlog in deportation cases.

David Normington, the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, admitted as much this week in an e-mail to immigration staff. He wrote: “The foreign national prisoner population is at record levels and it is clear that . . . we have not kept pace with that rising demand.”

Some prisoners have found other ways to evade deportation by making false asylum applications from their cells.

In 2002, a judge called on the Home Office to review procedures after jailing a Turkish man who should have been deported years before after serving a sentence for drugs offences. While in prison the man had made a fresh asylum application giving his real name but a false date of birth.

He was logged at the Home Office as a new applicant and the record of his criminality was effectively lost.

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