Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

In order to prevent foreign national offenders from committing further crimes in this country, what steps are being taken together with the Home Office to ban them from returning to the United Kingdom once they are repatriated?

[Chris Grayling]

The deportation process should mean that these people are not entitled to re-enter the UK. Of course, the increased sharing of data between European police forces is one way of ensuring that we know who they are before they try to enter the country and that they do not return. My hon. Friend and I share the same ambition of ensuring that people who have committed terrible crimes in other countries simply cannot come to live here.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

I simply reiterate that we have tried to drive through the necessary change to meet a financial challenge in the most sensitive way possible. The changes that the hon. Lady describes in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 were considered in detail in this House and the other place. Time again I hear from the Opposition Benches that Labour would do things differently, but although Labour Members have said that they will match our spending plans, they have yet to give any sense of what they would do to save money elsewhere.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

How many foreign national offenders are in our prisons, and what steps are being taken to return them to secure detention in their own countries?

[Andrew Selous]

As always, I commend my hon. Friend’s persistence on this issue. There are 10,319 foreign national offenders in custody—down from 11,153 in May 2010—and that figure is the lowest for the end of any quarter since March 2006. That is in marked contrast to the Labour Government under whom the number of foreign national offenders doubled.