UK Border Agency

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to open this important debate about not only the Home Office estimates but the Home Affairs Committee’s reports into the UK Border Agency. I am pleased to see the Minister and shadow Minister and so many right hon. and hon. Members who have direct experience of dealing with the UK Border Agency.

I particularly welcome members of the Home Affairs Committee who are here today. My hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) and the hon. Members for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) and for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) have made enormous contributions to the reports that the Select Committee has published in the past few years. The main feature of our reports is that they have been unanimous. Another feature has been our hope that with a succession of very carefully worded but carefully thought out reports we will be able to improve the quality of the UK Border Agency.

Right at the start, I want to make something clear. I have chaired the Home Affairs Committee for five years. We have produced our reports about the administration of the UKBA on a regular basis under the previous Government and the current Government, and we have been as critical in the former case as in the latter. There is no party political point in this; it is about trying to get the best possible service that can be provided to those who use the UKBA. We decided at the start of the Parliament to look regularly at how the UKBA operates, so every three months we revisit our report to see whether there has been any improvement in the system. We also decided to put up a number of key indicators by which we judge how the UKBA operates. It is not the usual kind of Select Committee report that has big and long recommendations; rather, we make specific suggestions that we want the UKBA to follow.

As the estimates indicate, the UKBA’s budget for 2012-13 is £1 billion, and it has a staff of 12,835, while the UK Border Force’s budget is £509 million, and it has a staff of 7,333. A number of ongoing issues arose under the previous Labour Government, and I shall touch on some of those. The first issue is foreign national offenders. There are 3,900 foreign national criminals living in the community who are subject to deportation, 57 of whom are part of the famous 2006 cohort who are still unable to be traced. In 2006, 1,013 foreign prisoners were released without any attempt being made to deport them. Of those, 844 people’s cases have been concluded, 399 people have been deported, 445 have not been deported, 93 are still in the process of being deported, 19 are serving another sentence, and 57 are untraceable. That situation has been ongoing for the past six years or so, and we will continue to monitor it until every one of those foreign national criminals has been found.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

Did my right hon. Friend’s Committee consider why, when someone is found guilty of a criminal offence in this country and sentenced to prison, we cannot find a way of sending them back to serve their sentence in the country that they came from, instead of having them serve it in our prisons so that we have problems years later in trying to send them back? My constituents are always asking me about this.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. These options need to be considered, as they were under the previous Labour Government in respect of Nigeria. Last Thursday, I was in her constituency with members of the Select Committee and we went to Brixton prison, where the governor told us that a third of the prisoners were foreign nationals and that he could not remember a single occasion when such a prisoner was removed at the end of their sentence; they were either taken into the community or made to report to a detention centre.

The Government need to be given credit for the fact that the average time taken to deport has been reduced from 131 days in 2008 to 74 days in 2011, but that is still far too long. There is still a lack of cohesion between the National Offender Management Service and the Home Office. UKBA staff are stationed at Brixton prison, but the problem is that the UKBA is not informed about cases involving foreign national criminals right at the beginning of the process, at the time of sentencing. We have recommended in successive reports that that should happen in order to shorten the period between the release of the prisoner and their being removed to his or her country.

In all the years I have been in this House, the main issue that has dogged the border forces has been the continual delays and backlogs that have gone on under successive Governments. We only recently discovered as part of our inquiry that a number of new, almost virtual reality, filing systems exist at the UKBA. There is the controlled archive which dates back to 2006; I prefer to call it the Tardis, because files go in there and seem never to come out. The controlled archive is the place where files are dumped in cases where the UKBA does not know where the people are.