In a plan immediately criticized by his rival Liz Truss’s camp as unworkable, the former chancellor said he would change deportation rules so that foreign nationals convicted of even relatively minor crimes such as shoplifting could be deported. Under what he described as a “radical new approach to curbing crime”, Sunak said deportation orders would be considered if people had been jailed for at least six consecutive months, rather than 12 as is the case today. Another new rule would mean that alien offenders imprisoned for any period three times would be considered for deportation. The overall goal would be to double the number of deportees. Sunak said the UK is “too soft on foreigners who commit crimes in our country”. In a separate element of his crime strategy, Sunak said any offenders deemed to be career criminals would automatically have an extra jail term added to their term for a new offence. The proposals are the latest in a series of immigration and asylum policy ideas from Sunak and Truss, who have been condemned by Amnesty International and others for “cruelty and immorality”. Truss, the foreign secretary, has pledged to extend the controversial policy started by Boris Johnson, under which even legitimate asylum seekers can be permanently deported to Rwanda, and said he would seek similar deals with other countries. Sunak has similarly advocated for an expansion of the Rwandan policy and at one point last week proposed housing illegal arrivals on cruise ships instead of hotels, despite concerns that this could amount to arbitrary detention and thus a violation of the country’s internal and international law. The idea of ​​halving the sentence threshold for deporting overseas offenders has been considered by the Home Office under Priti Patel, but was not taken forward partly because it was felt that those jailed for relatively minor offenses could often block deportation under of human rights law. Such deportations are often contested under the existing system, with campaigners expressing concern at the number of people who were removed and came to the UK as children or young people. Campaigners also said that people from Caribbean countries such as Jamaica appear to be disproportionately targeted for deportation if they commit crimes, compared to people of other nationalities. Sunak has pledged to back a Johnson government plan for a UK Bill of Rights, which would seek to loosen the influence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on how the law is applied. Truss has said she could remove the UK from the ECHR entirely and her campaign said that without action to speed up deportations, Sunak’s plan would only add to the numbers awaiting removal. “This thin announcement is a desperate ploy that contains no proposals that will actually double the number of deportations, it just adds to the number in the queue,” said Truss-backed MP Chris Philp, who was a former immigration secretary under Johnson . A Home Office spokesman said: “Removing foreign offenders is a priority for this Government and since January 2019, despite the challenges of the pandemic, we have removed 10,741 foreign criminals. “The pool of people eligible for removal is not the barrier to returns, it is the well-targeted legal challenges used by people and their legal representatives that require systemic change. That is why our Nationality and Borders Act makes it harder for those trying to make last-minute claims as a delaying tactic to thwart removals.”