Foreign National Offenders (Exclusion from the UK) Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Philip Davies(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Philip Davies
I agree with my hon. Friend’s sentiments, but, given where we are, we are going have to do something to give judges as little discretion as possible, because the more discretion we give them, the more they defy the will of Parliament.
Sir Edward Leigh
I apologise to my hon. Friend if during my remarks I stressed my personal point of view, which is that if someone is sentenced to more than 12 months, they should be deported. I am not agonising too much about that. The problem is that so many of the people who are sentenced to more than 12 months are not being deported. Does my hon. Friend see that point? We should just concentrate on doing away with article 8 and getting our own Bill of Rights so that we can actually deport these serious criminals.
Philip Davies
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend.
For completeness, I should say that the Court of Appeal stated in R v. Mintchev:
“As a matter of principle it would not be right to reduce an otherwise appropriate sentence so as to avoid the”
automatic deportation provisions. A further clarification stated that
“automatic deportation provisions are not a penalty included in the sentence. They are instead a consequence of the sentence.”
My public service broadcasting message from today to judges is that they should look at the Court of Appeals judgment in that case, so that we do not end up with any other problems like that. There are many crimes for which sentences cannot be appealed, so it is important that judges deal with things the first time. We cannot always rely on the Court of Appeal.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is right. Of course the situation is only going to get worse. We had net immigration into the UK last year of more than 320,000 people. It is not necessary to be the chief statistician to work out that the number of foreign national offenders will keep going up and up, as the number of foreign nationals coming into the UK goes up.
Sir Edward Leigh
It is the settled policy of Her Majesty’s Government—I see the Minister for Europe speaking with the Deputy Speaker now—that Turkey should enter the European Union. They support that application, and indeed it has been fast-tracked. There are 77 million Turks. Turkish jails are notoriously appalling. There is absolutely no doubt that if Turkey joined the EU, as is our settled policy, every single one of these 77 million Turks would have an absolute right of entry into this country. A proportion of them would naturally end up in prison, and I predict that very few of them would ever be sent back to Turkish prisons.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is right. In many respects the problem is even more immediate, because my understanding of last week’s negotiations is that Turkish people will be able to enter the EU without visas, so we do not even have to wait until Turkey joins the EU to see that happen, so of course the problem is going to get worse. That is why the Bill is absolutely urgent. We cannot wait to implement its measures; we need to do something now.
When we look at the number of EU foreign nationals in UK prisons since the introduction of free movement, we see that just six countries—the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Poland—account for over half that population. It is from those countries that we have seen the huge growth in the number of people coming over to the UK from the EU. The numbers from countries such as Spain and Germany are much smaller by comparison.
Of course, the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering did not make—I mention it for completeness’ sake—is what has happened to prisoner numbers in those EU countries. Members may or may not be surprised to learn that at the same time that we have been taking more Polish and Romanian prisoners into UK jails, there has been a corresponding reduction in the prison population in those countries. Members may speculate on why Romania’s prison population has plummeted at the same time as the number of Romanians in UK prisons has gone through the roof. I suggest that the two may be linked, and it is for others to try to disprove that link. It seems to me to be rather more than a coincidence.
My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering said—it was the one part of his speech with which I disagreed—that that was a stain on countries such as Poland, and that it besmirched them. Good luck to them, I say. They seem to be playing a very sensible game. I make no criticism of Poland for wanting to export its criminals to other parts of the European Union. My quibble is not with Poland, but with the UK Government for allowing these people into the country in the first place and not kicking them out at the first possible opportunity. I make no criticism of Poland; I criticise the UK Government for not getting a grip of the situation.
This is a growing problem in our prisons. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering rightly said, we have very few prisoners from other parts of the world. We have 180 from the whole of central and south America put together. That tells its own story. This is a direct consequence of our membership of the EU.
We must do something to prevent re-entry. The Bill, on its own, is essential, and hopefully I have explained why we need to do something about kicking people out of the country more efficiently than we are currently doing, but that will be pointless if we do not also have measures in place to prevent re-entry. Otherwise it is just a token gesture. The hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) tabled an early-day motion on this issue. It states:
“That this House notes that the criminal convictions held by EU citizens that are revealed by a Disclosure and Barring Service check are only those held in central records in the UK; is concerned that this does not therefore include convictions held abroad of foreign nationals; further notes that it is not obligatory for an employer to require an employee to provide a certificate of good conduct from their home country; and therefore calls on the Government to introduce and enforce the obligatory disclosure of any previous convictions held by EU and other foreign-born citizens upon application for a job in the UK.”
That is a very sensible early-day motion, and it goes to show that the Bill’s provisions, and indeed going a bit further than my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering, would command support from not just people such as me, but Members on both sides of the House.
Given the points raised by Opposition Members—whether the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, who is a senior Member of the House, or a former shadow Home Secretary—I hope we can look forward to the shadow Minister telling us that the Labour party also agrees with the provisions in the Bill and would actually support going further.
What the shadow Minister says will be important, because this is the last day for private Members’ Bills in this Session, and there will be no further opportunities to take the further stages of any Bill scheduled for today. Therefore, if the Labour party could indicate its support for making it easier to deport foreign nationals, that would give the Government some encouragement to make their own provisions when time runs out for this Bill. I am sure the Minister would be encouraged to know that Opposition parties welcomed more work being done on this issue in the House.
We have no way of knowing the criminal past of any EU citizen entering the UK, contrary to what somebody said in a debate I took part in on the EU. We will have to do a top 10 list of the most outlandish claims by those who want to stay in the EU, but my No. 1 at the moment is that when somebody comes to passport control, we scan their passport and the computer comes up with all their criminal offences in their home country, so we do not have to let them in if we do not want to. I would love that system to be in place, but I am afraid it is a work of fiction—it does not exist at all, as I hope the Minister will also be able to confirm.
I do not want to test the patience of the House—others want to contribute, and there are other matters to be debated today—but I want to make it clear that the Bill is essential; it would certainly command the majority of support among my constituents, and I have indicated that it would also command the support of people on both sides of the House.
Had we been able to kick people out of the country, and had we had a robust policy of border control so that we could take fingerprints or DNA, that might have helped to prevent the Romanian burglar who left his fingerprints and DNA at many of the 31 homes he burgled from getting away with all those crimes because he was not on any DNA database when he entered the country. It might also have dealt with the Lithuanian burglar who was released from prison early and deported, only to be found living back in Britain 12 days later, along with his accomplice, who had apparently been deported from the country not once but twice.
That is what is actually happening in our country day in, day out, week in, week out. We are exposed to dangerous foreign criminals. We have many unnecessary victims of crime in the UK because we are not controlling our borders and not deporting foreign national offenders, even when we know who they are.
The Bill could have prevented the Lithuanian convicted of a knife-point robbery before he came to the UK from going on to rape two women shortly after his arrival. There could be no more tragic example of the problem we face than the death of 14-year-old schoolgirl Alice Gross. The man suspected of killing her had come from Latvia after apparently serving a paltry seven-year prison sentence for killing his wife, yet nobody here knew of his terrible past. The Government have a duty to protect people who live here, and their scandalous failure to do so has had the most dire consequences for many families, including that of Alice Gross.
There is no more important matter facing the House today than this. I hope we will hear from all parties that they will support provisions to make it easier to deport foreign national offenders to keep us safe. The current situation is unacceptable. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering for doing something about it, and I hope the Government will indicate today that they will do something about it too.
EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Philip Davies(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Philip Davies
I suspect that, in the short term, not a fat lot would happen to the £62 billion trade deficit with the EU, as we would pretty much carry on in the same way. We would keep trading with it, and it would keep trading with us. I tried to check that out. I asked the Prime Minister, after one of his European Council meetings, whether he had had any discussions with Angela Merkel that would indicate that, if we were to leave the EU, she would want her country to stop selling BMWs, Mercedes, Volkswagens and Audis free of tariff to the UK. The Prime Minister did not say anything at all about that, so I presumed that he had not heard anything. Given his determination that we should stay in the EU, I am sure that, if he had had any inkling at all that the Germans were not going to continue selling us their cars free of tariff, he would have been more than happy to put it on the public record. As people can see from his answer, it appears that he had had no such indication from the German Government that they would stop trading freely with us.
Sir Edward Leigh
The answer to my hon. Friend’s question is simple: if we left the EU, we would not have to pay a £10 billion a year subscription just to have a £70 billion a year deficit.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. At the end of the day, what this boils down to is people’s confidence in their negotiating abilities. I used to work for Asda, and I fear that, if some of my hon. Friends had been our buyers and had used their negotiating skills, we would have gone bust. In effect, what many of my colleagues are saying—and what Labour Members are saying—is that we have a £62 billion trade deficit, but we do not think that we can negotiate a free trade agreement without handing over a huge membership fee every single year. That is the easiest negotiation known to mankind. If they cannot negotiate that deal, what on earth can these people negotiate? If the Prime Minister were to claim that he could not negotiate a free trade deal with the EU based on that trade deficit every year—I am sure that he will not say that because he claims to be a good negotiator—he would not be fit to lead this country into those negotiations. That is what I would say to anybody who aspires to such a role.
Philip Davies
No, I do not accept that at all. The Prime Minister has done absolutely nothing to stop these people coming into the UK—literally nothing. There is nothing in place to stop them; there are a few people on a watch list whom we can stop coming into the UK, but they would be on a watch list whether we were in the EU or outside it. We need to develop a watch list for people from around the world, because this is not an EU issue. We can already stop those people coming to the UK, and we would always be able to stop them coming to the UK, if they are on a terrorist watch list. I am talking about the thousands and thousands of criminals who are unknown to the British authorities, who come through every week on an EU passport to commit their crimes. When I was out with West Yorkshire police a few years ago—this might seem fanciful, and it seemed fanciful to me when I first heard it—they told me they had a problem with people getting a short-haul flight from other EU countries to Leeds Bradford airport, going out into Leeds city centre and committing high-value crimes and robberies, and then being back on the plane out to their country of origin before the police have even finished investigating the crime. I had not even thought that that type of thing could happen, but West Yorkshire police told me that that was a serious concern for them.
Of course, it is easy for people do these things while we are in the EU—there is nothing to prevent them from coming here. They are known to their own national law enforcement agencies, so they are at risk of being apprehended in their own countries. It is much easier for them to commit crimes in the UK, where they are not known to anybody—they can come in and go out in a flash. We have to be aware that these are problems.
Sir Edward Leigh
To be absolutely fair—we should be fair, and that is why we need an independent audit—our own crooks can presumably do the same in those other countries?
Philip Davies
Yes, indeed. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The problem is that there are much richer pickings in the UK than in some of the countries these people come from.
The other aspect of this is that, even if these people run the risk of being caught, they would, I suspect, much prefer to spend their time in a British prison than in a prison in their home nation. So this is a win-win, given their chances of being caught and what happens when they are caught. I am afraid that that does not quite work the same in reverse.
Sir Edward Leigh
That sort of casual statement is quite worrying, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for telling us about it.
I was about to deal with the cost of EU membership. The following information is taken from various papers that I have been studying. The cost is set to be £3.1 billion higher over the next five years than forecast before the 2015 general election. This is not a static process, therefore. That change is due to a reassessment of the size of Britain’s economy relative to the rest of the EU, thus penalising the UK for its economic success. The bigger and more successful we get, the greater a magnet for migrants we become and the bigger the sub we have to pay, despite the fact that the deficit carries on much the same as it always has done.
Philip Davies
On that point, is it not ironic that the Prime Minister trumpets the fact that he has managed to get a cut in the EU budget but did not mention that as a part of that cut the UK’s contribution to the EU budget went up, not down?
Sir Edward Leigh
I am astonished that in this great negotiating triumph no attempt has been made to address the issue of the rebate, and I will give a few details on that in a moment. This was considered to be one of the most important issues—such as when Mrs Thatcher secured the reduction—but no attempt has been made to deal with it.
For 2016 the UK will pay £9.5 billion. It was only expected to pay £8.2 billion. Everybody casually rolls off the figure of £9 billion now as if we always thought it would be £9 billion, but it was not always going to be £9 billion; it was going to be £8.2 billion. It has suddenly gone up and nobody in the Government or elsewhere complains about that to our partners. I remember that when my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and I were Ministers everybody talked about our “European partners”. This Government seem to have dropped that; they have dropped all the visionary case for Europe in terms of partnership and so forth. They all claim they are great Eurosceptics, but they do not tell us the casual little fact that we were expected to pay £8.2 billion and that has now gone up to £.9.5 billion. We are now estimated to pay just under £250 million per week for EU membership.
Civitas has debunked the Government claim that the EU makes each household better off by £3,300 per year. The Government can argue against Civitas and have an analysis of its case, but they do make that claim. It would be nice to have some analysis of where they get those figures from, but we have not been given that.
According to Open Europe, the top five costliest EU regulations enforced in the UK are: the UK renewable energy strategy, with a recurring cost of £4.7 billion a year; the capital requirements directive IV package, with a recurring cost of £4.6 billion a year; the working time directive, with a recurring cost of £4.2 billion a year. I appreciate that one of the cases made by the Labour party is that it rather likes the working time directive. That is a perfectly logical, good case to make, and I have no argument with them making it, but I would like to know—perhaps the Labour party, the Government and the people would like to know—whether this figure of a recurring cost of £4.2 billion a year is right.
The next cost in the list is the EU climate and energy package, with a recurring cost of £3.4 billion a year. I am quoting Open Europe, which may be wrong, but the Minister can debunk these arguments if he wishes. Then there is the temporary agency workers directive, with a recurring cost of £2.1 billion a year. These are not insignificant sums—£4.7 billion, £4.6 billion, £4.2 billion, £3.4 billion, £2.1 billion—but how much detailed analysis are the British people being given about any of this?
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Is it not also ironic that the Labour party seems to be so enthusiastic for our membership of the EU, yet it comes to the House every month and asks that the Government do more to help the steel industry and the coal industry when it is the policies of the EU that are doing most to obliterate the steel and coal industries in the UK?
Sir Edward Leigh
I have mentioned Grimsby and fishing, but my constituency also abuts Scunthorpe. What about these poor people there? They are also going to be allowed to vote on 23 June, and are being encouraged to do so. They would rather like to know the detailed costs of what the EU means for their jobs and what the possible alternatives are. This is serious stuff for them—it is not just a debate in the House of Commons; it is about their whole way of life and their town.
Sir Edward Leigh
This is the worst case scenario and I am being completely fair in putting it. I think it is unlikely.
Sir Edward Leigh
Does not my hon. Friend want me to go on with the best case scenario? Then I will give way to him.
According to Open Europe,
“In a best case scenario, where the UK strikes a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, pursues very ambitious deregulation of its economy and opens up almost fully to trade with the rest of the world, UK GDP would be 1.6% higher than if it had stayed within the EU.
However, these are outliers. The more realistic range is between a 0.8% permanent loss to GDP in 2030 – where the UK strikes a comprehensive trade deal with the EU but does nothing else; and a 0.6% permanent gain in GDP in 2030 – where it pursues free trade with the rest of the world and deregulation, in addition to an EU FTA.”
These arguments about disaster and millions of jobs being lost are, I think, overstated, but I may be wrong. I keep making this point: the Government have vast resources, such as the National Audit Office and the Office for Budget Responsibility. We would like to know before we cast our vote.
Philip Davies
The Treasury now acknowledges that 3 million jobs depend on trading with the EU, not on being a member of the EU. If that is the case—I am sure there is a lot of truth in it—given our substantial trade deficit with the European Union, does that not mean, therefore, that about 5 million jobs in the EU are dependent on its trade with the UK?
Sir Edward Leigh
Yes, that is the point that was made time and again during the debate yesterday. I am not sure the Government have entirely answered it to my satisfaction.
The Government seem to argue that were we to vote to leave the EU, that would be such a catastrophic snub to our EU partners that there would be a degree of vengeance. I think that is a childlike view of how policy is created in Paris and Berlin. Many people in France—I take a bit of an interest in this—have argued for many years that it would not be an absurd state of affairs for Britain to leave the EU, for all sorts of reasons. However, the Government argue that a dramatic vengeance game would be initiated.
By the way, if our European partners acted in that way, would we want to have anything to do with them? It is a ridiculous argument anyway. They would not behave in that way, because of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies)—because of our trade deficit with them, particularly with our German friends. They are intimately bound up with us in terms of trade and there is every incentive to conclude a reasonable deal.
Sir Edward Leigh
Perhaps I have banged on a bit too much about the economy, and should briefly touch on defence and security, as it is in my hon. Friend’s Bill and is a matter of acute concern. Apart from “Project Fear”, which is based on this false premise of a loss of millions of jobs—Lord Mandelson appears to have made that up on the back of a fag packet—which no one has ever quantified in any great detail, although we wait to hear what the Government say about that, there are all these arguments about security. David Owen, a former Labour Foreign Secretary, who has now come out in favour of leaving the EU, dealt with that matter and debunked it very well on his interview on the “Today” programme yesterday. He asked how the European Union has improved our security by creating, in an imperialist and expansionist way, a new trade association deal with Ukraine, which led directly to Russian fears of being encircled and to the annexation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. By the way, I do not countenance, approve or support in any way what Russia has done. The fact is that the EU gave President Putin that opportunity.
In a direct answer to my hon. Friend, is it really conceivable that, if the UK decided to leave the EU, our friends and allies in the Baltic states would want to throw us into some appalling doghouse and have nothing more to do with us when their freedom and security depends so much on us? We do have the strongest armed forces in the European Union. France and Britain are the only two countries that are capable of deploying world power. The Minister who is summing up this debate has considerable expertise in this matter because, as a Back Bencher, he spent years talking about it.
Although I cannot speak for the French Government, I do regularly speak to people in France, and I can assure Members that France has no interest or desire in not continuing to co-operate in an ever closer way, in terms of an ever closer union of sovereign states, in military policy. This whole argument that, somehow, the peace and security of Europe would be endangered if we were to leave the EU does not hold water. I will not repeat all the arguments that have been made many times before about our peace and security depending not on remaining in the EU, but on NATO. That is not a point that can be directly summed up in any cost- benefit analysis, but it needs to be articulated. We Eurosceptics are not nationalists. We love Europe; we love Europeans; we love European culture; and we want to have the closest possible relationship with our friends in France and Germany.
Let us go back to some of the detailed studies of the cost-benefit analysis. I am very grateful to the Library of the House of Commons for this. In fact, we should pay tribute to it because it is one of the few bodies that has actually attempted, with its limited resources, to collate all these studies. The study by the Institute for Economic Affairs—Minford et al, 2005—“Should Britain leave the EU” estimates a range of 3.2% to minus 3.7% of GDP in ongoing costs. I have dealt with Open Europe. The 2014 study by Gianmarco Ottaviano “Brexit or Fixit? The Trade and Welfare Effects of Leaving the European Union”, the Centre for Economic Performance and the London School of Economics estimated the trade-related costs to the UK of leaving the EU as being in the range of 2.2% to 9.5% of GDP. That is their argument, but it would be nice for it to be tested. In the literature review for “Our Global Future”, the CBI—again, I am not citing people who are naturally friendly to my point of view, but we need to test the arguments—found that the net benefit arising from EU membership is somewhere in the region of 4% to 5% of UK GDP.
Philip Davies
Does my hon. Friend have the figures that the CBI gave for the great benefits that we would have received when it recommended that we join the euro?
Sir Edward Leigh
We should have had more independent analysis of that. Conservative Members often criticise Gordon Brown, but we should never forget that he kept us out of the euro, against the wishes of his Prime Minister, Tony Blair. We were told that disaster would strike by some in the City of London, the CBI and so on, and they used precisely these arguments. Now the Prime Minister goes to the Dispatch Box and says as a great virtue that we are out of the euro, but we were told by all the powers of the establishment that not joining the euro would be a disaster, and many of the arguments used were exactly the same.