Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Baroness Hamwee

Report stage
Monday 3rd November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I will raise two points. I very much support someone who has an order of deportation being removed, as I suspect the whole House does. However, Amendment 34 is not, as the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, suggested, for somebody who has a prison sentence; it applies to anyone who has been convicted of an offence. Does that mean that if somebody is convicted of careless driving, they are actually to be deported? On reading Amendment 34(2), that is exactly what it appears to mean. That seems to me a trifle extreme.

Secondly, although I recognise that deportation to a safe country that is prepared to take the person back is one thing, where, I wonder, does the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, intend that people who have come from unsafe countries should go to? What concerns me is that when someone from Afghanistan, Syria at the moment, Darfur or Iran, commits an offence, it is unlikely that they could be sent back there. Therefore, where, according to the wording of this amendment, should these people go?

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, would the noble and learned Baroness agree that it could also be described as extreme that, as per Amendment 72, a deportation order would not be subject to appeal under the two Acts cited, or any other enactment, and that:

“A deportation order made under this section is final and not liable to be set aside in any court”?

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I support both these amendments. It is sensible that we set a presumption that those who are here effectively as our guests have to follow the rules. Insisting that they be deported if they commit crimes strikes me as very sensible. Putting it in statute is important. We have done this before in the past, when we were having problems with courts interpreting very broadly some of the human rights legislation around people’s right to a family life. We made some clear rules and put them in primary legislation in the Immigration Act 2014, and that largely—not entirely—dealt with those problems. There was a rule in there that if you were given a prison sentence of a certain length, you had to be deported. This is a logical extension of that. It would strengthen the Government’s hand in a number of the cases that my noble friends Lord Jackson and Lord Cameron set out, where Ministers sound as frustrated as the rest of us that they are not able to deport people, or, if they are, only after a very lengthy legal process.

To pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, about challenging the deportation, my noble friend’s amendment is drafted as such because the person concerned would have had the opportunity under the criminal law to challenge his sentence if there was some issue with the legal case, but, having been convicted of the criminal offence concerned, it should follow that they are then deported. You should not get a second bite of the cherry to have, in effect, another appeal when you have already had the chance to appeal against the sentence in the first place.

The other benefit of these amendments is that, although initially they would indeed be challenging for the Government for the reasons that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, set out, including around where you can send people back to, the proposal would force the Government to do two things. First, it would force them to engage with some of the countries where returning people is more challenging. You can do that by sending people back before they finish serving their sentence—you have a prisoner transfer agreement, where they can go back to their home country and continue serving the sentence in that country, before their release from prison. That is the preferable outcome, where they still have a measure of justice.

The second thing the proposal would do is force the Government to confront the cases that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, set out. I accept that they are challenging, but it cannot be right that, because somebody is from a certain country, they can come to the United Kingdom, commit any level of criminality and, once they have finished their prison sentence, we cannot get rid of them.

We should force the Government to confront two tests. The first is to ask whether someone who comes from a country that we do not deem safe should forfeit the right to not be sent back to it by their conduct.