Steve Reed
Main Page: Steve Reed (Labour (Co-op) - Streatham and Croydon North)Department Debates - View all Steve Reed's debates with the Wales Office
(10 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Prime Minister
I am sure that we have all had constituency and other e-mails and casework about this, but I have to say that every time I ask the Treasury about it, it is very clear that the things that are being investigated are abuses and were known to be abuses at the time when people entered into them. I want low tax rates, but tax rates that people actually pay; and where schemes are being used for avoidance, we should be very swift in closing them down.
Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)
Q14. The National Audit Office blames a lack of co- ordination across three Departments for the Government’s failure to deport hundreds of foreign criminals, many of them highly dangerous, so where does the buck stop: with the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Justice Secretary, or the Prime Minister himself?
The Prime Minister
The buck absolutely stops with me; I am very clear about that. I think the NAO has produced a very good report on a difficult issue that we need to get right. We have deported 22,000 foreign national offenders since I became Prime Minister. The report is very clear that since 2013 for the first time we have got a proper cross-Government strategy to deal with this, but it also goes into quite a lot of detail about how there are still too many obstacles in terms of human rights legislation that we need to change. What we have seen from the Government this week is that we are now able to deport people first and they can appeal once they have gone back to their country of origin; and we are reducing the number of appeal routes from 17 routes, which were there under Labour, to just four. We are making progress. The buck stops with me, but I wouldn’t mind a bit of cross-party support for the actions we need to take.