Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the principal barriers have been to the deportation of foreign nationals convicted of sexual offences since 2024; and what steps her Department is taking to help tackle those barriers.

The Home Office deals with significant and complex challenges when seeking to return those who have no right to be in the UK to their country of origin. Sometimes the UK’s current obligations under international law prohibit us from returning certain individuals despite their criminality. Legal or re-documentation barriers can frustrate immediate deportation. Despite these barriers, we are fully committed to making our communities safer by deporting those who break our laws.

To address these challenges, this government is committed to reforming the appeals process by creating a new appeals body with professionally trained adjudicators. We will also strengthen the certification regime to deny appeal rights for clearly unmeritorious claims. Furthermore, the number of countries that foreign national offenders can be deported to before they can lodge an appeal from abroad has also been increased.

We are also working to reform Human Rights and Modern Slavery claims. In these areas we will rebalance the public interest test for Article 8 claims and work with our international partners to reform the application of the ECHR’s prohibition on inhuman or degrading treatment. With the Modern Slavery reforms legislation will be brought forward to clarify our responsibilities under international law, the removal of reconsideration for negative decisions, enhanced screening for individuals detained for removal, and a stronger link between timely disclosure and credibility of a claim.

Finally, under new measures introduced by the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, sexual offences which give rise to the notification requirement in Schedule 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 will be assumed to be ‘particularly serious’ for the purpose of applying Article 33(2) of the Refugee Convention, thereby allowing the UK to exclude those individuals from being granted asylum protections in the UK.

Where removal is still not possible due to our ECHR obligations, the provision will ensure that such individuals are not afforded the generous benefits of protection status in the UK.