Charlie Elphicke
Main Page: Charlie Elphicke (Independent - Dover)Department Debates - View all Charlie Elphicke's debates with the Home Office
(13 years ago)
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Damian Green
Successive Home Secretaries and Immigration Ministers have grappled with that suggestion. One problem is that we would need to know that offenders would be sentenced to some kind of equivalent term in their own country. Otherwise, we would have the terrible situation that somebody could commit a serious crime in this country in the full knowledge that the worst thing that would happen to them if they were caught and convicted would be that they were returned home free to their own country. I cannot believe that the right hon. Gentleman wants that to happen. That is why successive Governments have not taken that path.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
I have seen people in the Dover removal centre who have been there for three years, being held in stasis after having served their sentence. May I urge the Minister to take all measures possible to get such people out of the system as quickly as possible? It seems basically unfair that they should be incarcerated when they have served their sentence.
Damian Green
I take my hon. Friend’s point, and he is assiduous in his work on the conditions at the removal centre in his constituency. I can assure him that this Government—like the previous Government, to be fair—will keep people in detention after their prison sentence has finished only if they are thought to pose a danger to the wider community. I am sure he will appreciate that if such people cannot be deported immediately for the reasons that we have been discussing, but they pose a danger to the British public, the best place for them is in immigration detention.