Scheduled Mass Deportation: Jamaica

Ben Bradley Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

The hon. Lady, the shadow Minister, asks about the Windrush scheme. As she will be aware, over 6,300 people have now been given citizenship, quite rightly, and 13,300 documents have been issued to those people who suffered terrible wrongs in the past. In terms of compensation, 226 people have now received claims totalling in excess of £2.1 million, with a great deal more to pay out. I can also confirm that all of these cases on the plane have been individually assessed, and none of them is eligible for the Windrush compensation scheme.

The hon. Lady spent a great deal of time talking about Windrush during her question, but I say again—as I said in my letter to her—that it is completely wrong to conflate the people who were the victims of terrible injustice in the Windrush cases with these cases, who are nothing to do with Windrush, have no Windrush entitlement at all, and have committed terrible criminal offences. She also asks about the age eligibility. The Government are fully committed to discharging their obligation under the 2007 Act, which is to seek to remove anyone of any age who has been sentenced to a custodial term of over 12 months. That has been, is, and will remain our policy.

I am not going to comment on the individual operational circumstances surrounding any particular flight, but we are fully committed to the 2007 Act’s provisions. In relation to children, there is a well defined test around family rights and how they interact with removal. It is possible for people to go to the courts if they want to test their family rights against the Government’s obligations to remove them. But we are clear that our priority is protecting British citizens from dangerous criminals, and that is what we are doing.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con) [V]]

The overwhelming majority of Mansfield residents will feel that foreign criminals of any nationality who violate our laws and our values should be removed from this country. Will my hon. Friend assure me and my constituents that it is public safety that is at the front of his mind; will he be clear that Labour’s attempts to draw everything into an argument about race are both plainly wrong and quite brazenly an attempt to silence people it disagrees with; and will he call out those celebrities who have spent the weekend trying to use their public profiles to shame businesses into not helping to remove murderers from the UK?

[Chris Philp]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s sentiments. This is about protecting the British public. I am aware of cases where people have been removed from the deportation or removal programme owing to various appeals and have then gone on to commit crimes against our fellow citizens. It is precisely the kind of repeat crimes that damage our fellow citizens, our constituents, that we are seeking to prevent.

In relation to the celebrities and everything they have been saying, they should pay attention to the fact that, as I said before, the majority of removals and deportations are to European countries, and any suggestion that there is a racial element to this is obviously confounded by a straightforward look at the facts. Over half of the flights are to European countries. Less than 1% of removals in the past year have been to Jamaica, and anyone who is assisting the Home Office in those flights is doing a service to the country by protecting our fellow citizens.