Oral Answers to Questions

Caroline Ansell Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Dominic Raab)]

Since the last oral questions the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 has entered into force, I published the Bill of Rights and we submitted our victims Bill to pre-legislative scrutiny.

[Caroline Ansell]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his response. For as many years as I have served as Eastbourne’s Member of Parliament, Eastbourne residents have expressed to me their dismay, their outrage even, that foreign national offenders—dangerous criminals—have used the right to family life to frustrate their deportation, a deportation ordered for public safety. How will the Bill of Rights address that?

[Dominic Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend; she is absolutely right. The Bill of Rights is now published and she will see, explicitly and squarely in relation to article 8, clear guidance and prescription on interpretation to prevent the ever-elastic interpretations of the right to family life, the shifting goalposts, that allows those offenders to trump the overwhelming public interest in their deportation.