Removal of Foreign National Offenders and EU Prisoners

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I accept that my hon. Friend has his own personal reasons for remembering very much the impact of the D-day landings. It is true that those who gave their lives on the beaches of Normandy did so to protect our freedoms. The Government, as I indicated in my response to his question, have put in place a number of measures, and we continue to work to do more to ensure that we can protect the public from those serious criminals—rapists and others—who may choose to come here from whichever country they come from. My hon. Friend referred to the Bill of Rights: it is the Government’s intention to bring forward a Bill of Rights, and that was referred to in the Gracious Speech that we heard a few weeks ago. I can assure him that the action that the Government have taken, for example in rebalancing the interests of the public and the interests of foreign national offenders, in the reference to article 8, show that we take seriously the need to ensure that the human rights of the British public are recognised when we deal with these issues.

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

While I congratulate the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) on securing this question, I hope that he will not be too offended that I do not agree with every word of his opportunistic election broadcast on behalf of the leave campaign. Is it not plainly the case that this is not an EU question but a question of the competence, or lack of it, of his Government and his Home Secretary? As last week’s Select Committee report makes clear, while there has been progress on the deportation of foreign national offenders, it has been too slow.

Does the Home Secretary agree with what the Prime Minster told the Liaison Committee in May? He said that she and the Home Office “should have done better” on this issue. This is not the first time that the Home Secretary has been warned about these failings. In the last Parliament, the National Audit Office found that more than a third of failed removals were the result of factors within the Home Office’s control. Despite that, we now learn that the problem is getting worse, not better, in some areas. The Select Committee said that it was deeply concerned that there were nearly 6,000 foreign national offenders living in the community—the highest figure since 2012. Can the Home Secretary explain why the figure is so high? How many of those people are still subject to active deportation proceedings, and what is she doing to bring the figure down? She urgently needs to get a grip on the issue.

Does the Home Secretary agree that it is much easier to do that while remaining part of the European Union, and that leaving would make it harder to deport people? Is it not the case that the prisoner transfer agreement at least provides a framework to speed up the process and that country-to-country deals are far harder to achieve? Is it not also true that our access to the Schengen information system and the European criminal records information system helps us to stop criminals arriving here, and the European arrest warrant means that they can be brought to justice?

Finally, would not the British people be better off listening to the two former Met commissioners and other senior police who, at the weekend, said that our membership of the EU helps us to fight crime, rather than to the unpleasant scaremongering of the leave campaign?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman’s early remarks do not sit well with the facts that I have presented to the Commons. Last year, we deported a record number of foreign national offenders. Of course, the Government should always do more and always seek to ensure that we can improve our ability to do so. He talked about the higher numbers of people in the community, but it is also the case that because of the number of criminal record checks that the police now undertake with other countries we have secured a higher level of identification of foreign national offenders, which has increased the number available for us to deal with, and for all of them we make every effort, and continue to make efforts, to deport.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s final point, I agree that it is easier for us to deal with these issues as a member of the European Union. He mentioned a number of tools and instruments available to us. On the figure I quoted in relation to foreign criminal checks, he mentioned ECRIS and SIS, which mean that information is available to us at the border which would otherwise not be available.