Another foreigner gets a UK passport every five minutes

More than a million British passports have been issued to immigrants over the past decade according to new Government figures.

The 1,020,510 total - an average of 102,000 every year - means an immigrant is granted British citizenship every five minutes.

That equates to 12 people being approved for citizenship every hour, the Conservatives said, based on staff working round the clock.

In addition, the number of applications approved in 2006, 154,000, was almost four times higher than in the last full year of Tory rule in 1996.

The research will reignite demands for tougher rules and for citizenship to be a "privilege not a right".

Under current rules, even heinous criminals - including murderers and rapists - can be approved for a passport if they wait for a "clear period" before applying.

The one million applications approved by Labour includes July 21 bomb ringleader Muktar Said Ibrahim, whose bid was rubberstamped despite a string of criminal convictions.

Last night Conservative immigration spokesman Damian Green said the number of passports being handed out by the Government, including those to convicted criminals, was "extraordinary".

Mr Green added: "These figures show why it is so necessary to tighten our security controls.

"A new British passport is granted every five minutes, so we need to be absolutely sure that each one is going to someone who wants to play a positive role in this country."

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Yesterday Gordon Brown became embroiled in the citizenship row by claiming Ibrahim's case "would not happen now and he would not get citizenship of this country".

But Home Office documents reveal the Prime Minister was wrong and a criminal with identical convictions to the terrorist would still be entitled to a passport today.

The rules state that - provided they are not caught for a new offence during a clear period after being released from jail - the application would be approved.

In Ibrahim's case, he had to wait only 30 months after being freed from a five-year jail sentence for a string of robberies.

Officials later had to clarify Mr Brown's statement, made as he promised to "look closely" at the errors which allowed Ibrahim to leave for Pakistan using his passport - the only time he used it - despite being suspected of extremism in Britain.

They said he had been "reiterating" that Ibrahim would now automatically be considered for deportation, which may have prevented him getting to the stage of applying for citizenship.

There are no guarantees, however, that the fanatic - jailed for life yesterday - would have been removed to his native Somalia because it is routinely considered "unsafe".

And the rules say that, if he did apply, the convictions would not be sufficient reason for refusal.

Experts said the huge surge in citizenship applications was a direct result of Labour's "open door" immigration policy.

Opponents say Labour has woken up to the scale of citizenship applications far too late.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the think-tank Migrationwatch UK, said: "The British people have been systematically misled about this Government's true immigration policy."

A Home Office spokesman said the Government was carrying out a review of citizenship policy, and holding a serious criminal conviction could in future be a bar to citizenship. No decisions have been made.

Britain was yesterday accused of setting up obstacles to a cross-border arrest warrant designed to speed up the transfer within the EU of terrorism suspects.

EU Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini said governments including Britain were trying to place too many conditions on who should be removed.