Foreign National Offenders (Exclusion from the UK) Bill

Baroness Laing of Elderslie Excerpts

Friday 11th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that what we must discuss this morning are matters in the Bill, not matters that are not in the Bill. The Bill is a short one, and I am well aware of what is in it. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman knows that sticking strictly to what is in the Bill is essential.

[Mr Hollobone]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, as ever, for your wise counsel and guidance.

I want to praise Her Majesty’s Government for the prisons initiative in Jamaica. We now come to No. 8 on the list, which is India.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a helpful suggestion. I hope that the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department takes note and will deal with that.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Would the hon. Gentleman mind repeating the name of the case? I did not hear what he said.

[Philip Davies]

I apologise for not being clear. The case was from the Court of Appeal in 2011 and was that of R v. Mintchev. I appreciate your seeking clarification, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I fear that my Twitter feed would not be enough. I have 12,000 followers, all of whom hate me, so I am not entirely that the message would get across to my target audience.

As for how effective we currently are in removing foreign national offenders, the Public Accounts Committee released a report in January 2015 called “Managing and removing foreign nationals” that considered the effectiveness and efficiency of managing foreign offenders in UK prisons. I must say that the Committee’s summary was damning. It said:

“It is eight years since this Committee last looked at this issue. We are dismayed to find so little progress has been made in removing foreign national offenders from the UK. This is despite firm commitments to improve and a ten-fold increase in resources devoted to this work. The public bodies involved are missing too many opportunities to remove foreign national offenders early and are wasting resources, through a combination of a lack of focus on early action at the border and police stations, poor joint working in prisons, and inefficient caseworking in the Home Office.”

I will not go through all of the conclusions, but it was a damning report. We can clearly see that the system is not working.

When we consider the success rate of the Home Office in removing foreign criminals, we can see that it falls short of its own figures. The number of removals is very low compared with the number of referrals to immigration enforcement. Of the 5,262 referrals to the immigration enforcement team up to September 2015, only 2,855 people —50%—were removed. The Department was handed these people on a plate, but only half of them were removed.

I will not go into the figures for foreign national offenders in prison, because my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering went through them very clearly. His figures match mine and also match those of the National Audit Office. It is interesting to see why these removals fail. In its 2014 report, the National Audit Office concluded that 523 removals failed because of issues deemed to be within the control of the Home Office, and 930 failed removals were due to factors outside the control of the Home Office.

In 2013-14, of those reasons deemed to be within the Department’s control, 159 removals failed because emergency travel documents, EU letters or other documentation needed to transport the offender were unavailable. In seven cases, they failed because the tickets for travel had not been booked. It is a farce that someone had forgotten to book the tickets—you couldn’t make it up. How on earth that can happen, Lord only knows.

According to the NAO, the largest reason for failed removals that were deemed to be outside the Department’s control was offenders making an appeal outside the 28-day deadline. They might have submitted an asylum claim, a leave to remain claim or human rights claim. There might have been an injunction, a judicial review or representations received from a medical professional, a Member of Parliament or another Government Department. In 2013-14, 323 removals failed due to those reasons.

We have a situation where the Home Office is trying to kick someone out of the country, and another Government Department is working hard to keep them in the country, which does not say a great deal for joined-up Government. Perhaps the Minister can explain that. The National Audit Office produces a list of all the various failures, the reasons and how many there were for each, and I encourage people to look at it.

One problem is litigation. Indeed, in 2014, in response to an urgent question on this very subject, the Home Secretary said:

“The main problem we face is the rise of litigation; we have seen a 28% increase in the number of appeals.”—[Official Report, 22 October 2014; Vol. 586, c. 905.]

With an estimated £81 million spent in legal aid costs for foreign national offenders, it is clear that the whole process is not only time-consuming, but very expensive. In effect, the Government are paying to thwart the Government in deporting people from the country.

I am not sure whether my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough mentioned the case of William Danga in his remarks, but let me explain that Danga was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl. After completing his prison sentence, he challenged deportation on the grounds that he had a right to a family life. It was deemed that he could remain here because he had a girlfriend and a young child. This is someone who had raped what I would consider to be a child. Commenting on the case in 2011, a judge said that it was remarkable that he had not been deported for committing the rape. Clearly, there are some sensible judges around.

I raised this very issue with the Home Secretary in 2014, and suggested that, because we are not deporting people, we must ensure that we are tougher at the borders; and that we should take the DNA of foreign nationals who want to enter our country, which I thought was a small price to pay for keeping us safe.

Another concern is over foreign national offenders who are subject to deportation orders and who are then moved to open prisons—you couldn’t make it up. A foreign national has committed an offence and the Government clearly want to deport them, but the Ministry of Justice moves them into an open prison, where people can literally just walk out of the gates. Again, the Government have to do something about the scandal of foreign nationals subject to deportation orders doing that. In 2013 alone, 190 foreign national offenders absconded from our prisons. These are schoolboy mistakes in keeping tabs on people we want to deport.