House of Commons |
Session 2006 - 07 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates UK Borders Bill |
UK Borders Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Emily
Commander, Committee
Clerk
attended the Committee
Public Bill CommitteeTuesday 20 March 2007(Morning)[Mr. David Amess in the Chair]UK Borders BillClause 28Automatic
deportation
10.30
am
The
Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality (Mr.
Liam Byrne):
I beg to move amendment No. 110, in
page 14, line 28, leave out
or.
Mr.
Byrne:
These are highly technical amendments. Their
purpose is simple: to ensure that the appeal procedures under clause 31
operate effectively. We want to ensure that three things dovetail
neatly together: first, the powers for automatic deportation that we
seek; secondly, the non-suspension of appeal regime that we are putting
in place, and thirdly, the appeal system that we have sketched out in
the Bill.
Government
amendments Nos. 111 and 114 are designed to ensure that in-country
appeals can be brought only on arguable human rights and asylum
grounds. Once we have made a decision automatically to deport an
individual and they are still in the country, they usually lodge an
appeal with the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. That appeal can
contain human rights or asylum claims, but as it is an in-country
appeal, it is harder to remove the individual from the country to
conduct an appeal that is made on other grounds. Where the claim on
human rights or asylum grounds is spurious, we want to be able to
certify the claim as unfounded, to stop fraudulent or abusive human
rights and asylum claims.
The existing certification
powers apply to a claim only before the notice of appeal is lodged with
the tribunal. To use the powers that we want to create in the Bill, we
need to be able to stop the appeal by temporarily withdrawing the
decision automatically to deport, so that we can consider the claim,
certify it as unfounded and remake the decision automatically to
deport. The effect of that process would be to invalidate any further
appeal that is lodged, because the claim has been certified. The appeal
would then have to be heard outside the country, if there is still an
appeal to be heard. That is simply to ensure that the process of
automatic deportation is not hampered by the construction of the
law.
Damian
Green (Ashford) (Con): I have some sympathy with what the
Government are trying to achieve with this group of amendments. I have
a couple
of questions, however. The Minister talked about in-country appeals
having to be unarguable, thereby removing the possibility of unfounded
appeals. He will be aware that that interpretation will be in dispute.
We have all seen instances in which officialdom regards the case for an
appeal as unfounded and regards it as unarguable that an appeal should
not be allowed. Nevertheless, that is what people pay lawyers for: to
argue cases that the other side thinks unarguable. Will the Minister
give a bit more detail as to the circumstances in which a case would be
regarded as either unarguable or
unfounded?
The
Minister may correct me on this point, but my understanding of the
amendments suggests that the Secretary of State will decide whether an
appeal is unfounded. If the Secretary of State is not merely judge and
jury in his own cases, but is deciding whether there can be a judge and
jury in a case on which he has already taken a decision, that is a
recipe for judicial review. I have sympathy with the underlying aim of
reducing unnecessary legal delays in the system of arriving at a
decision about deportation, but I suspect that in practice there might
be one or two gremlins hidden in the interstices of the amendments. I
would be grateful if the Minister could address
them.
Mr.
Byrne:
Those are extremely helpful points, which I can
clarify. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his sympathetic
hearing and I wish to make two points in response. The first is that
there is already a process whereby the Secretary of State can certify
claims as clearly unfounded, and it operates for asylum claims. We can
get a sense of the number of decisions being taken from statistics that
are available: for example, between November 2002 and early 2006
something like 5,500 claims were certified by the Secretary of State as
clearly unfounded.
The hon. Gentleman is
absolutely right that there is the prospect of judicial review.
Parliament has some history of debating whether there should be
procedures for ousting the process of judicial review. We have had that
debate and we have no ambition to return to it. Judicial review is with
us, and there are no plans in the Bill to oust, diminish or in any way
undermine it. The hon. Gentleman will be interested to know that
something like 9 per cent. of the asylum claims that the Secretary of
State certified as unfounded in the period that I mentioned were
subject to judicial review. He is right to say that there is the
potential for judicial review of some decisions, but on the basis of
our experience that potential is reasonably low. Only 358 judicial
review claims were upheld, as a result of which only 63
certificates were withdrawn. That is a relatively small number given
the number of claims
certified.
The hon.
Gentleman also asked about the grounds on which certification may be
appropriate. They include cases in which no fear of mistreatment has
been expressed, in which the fear of mistreatment is not objective, in
which the feared mistreatment clearly does not amount to persecution or
in which sufficient protection or internal relocation is available. The
hon. Gentleman asked important questions, and we have four or five
years of experience of ensuring that the system works well enough in a
reasonably complex area. That is why we intend to extend its
scope.
Amendment
agreed to.
Amendment made: No. 111,
in page 14, line 30, at end
insert
,
or
(c) section 30(4)
applies..[Mr.
Byrne.]
Mr.
James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): I beg to move amendment
No. 56, in page 14, line 32, at end
add
(8) A person convicted
of an offence and made subject to a deportation order either under the
provisions of this section or otherwise may not be awarded compensation
in respect of any period spent in custody following their conviction,
whether the period in custody formed part of their sentence or
not..
The
purpose of the amendment is to place a bar on offenders made subject to
a deportation order receiving compensation. Part of the background to
it is that Lin Homer, the director general of the immigration and
nationality directorate, recently wrote to the Chairman of the Select
Committee on Home Affairs, the right hon. Member for Southampton,
Itchen (Mr. Denham), on the subject of foreign prisoners
facing deportation. She told him
that
since 1 April 2006
the Department has paid or payments are being processed to 9 claimants
and the sum total of these taken together is
£55,000...Typically, compensation has been paid out in
these cases due to technical deficiencies around serving the detainee
with appropriate legal
documents.
The
amendment would prevent any prisoner rightfully convicted from
receiving compensation in respect of time spent in custody. Two points
support that proposition: first, that the prisoners are the architects
of their own misfortune, and whatever else might happen to them and
whatever other rights they enjoy, they have only themselves to blame
for committing offences. Secondlyand even more
salientlyfor them to receive compensation is unacceptable to
the general public, and particularly to the victims of their offending.
They must find the receipt of compensation by the perpetrators most
offensivenot least because the victims of the crimes might not
receive any compensation themselves. It is unlikely, in many cases,
that the offenders will have the means to pay compensation to their
victims.
If the
victims have to use the criminal injuries compensation scheme for
compensation, they will find that its ambit is very limited and that
the amounts of compensation that are paidand that is not
applicable in every caseare often relatively modest, even by
the standards of todays compensation culture. That is one part
of the legal world where the compensation culture does not seem to have
taken root. I invite Members to consider the tariff set down by the
Criminal Injuries Compensation AuthorityI think that most
people would come to the conclusion that it is somewhat
modest.
It is
unacceptable that rightfully convicted foreign offenders receive
compensation. I believe that the Government will welcome the provision
where the operation of deportation is concerned because, with the best
will in the world, it does not always run smoothly, as the Minister
knows. There are sometimes difficulties regarding the country to which
the person is to be deported. Sometimes, for their convenience, the
Government do not want to be put under the pressure of facing a claim
for compensation, in respect of decisions that they take about the fate
of individual prisoners. The courts might come to a different
conclusion under the relevant treaty provisions and decide that
compensation is payable.
It is hard to see circumstances
in which the public will find it acceptable that those criminals should
receive compensation. If the Minister is not with me on that, will he
tell me exactly why not and if there is any legal reason why a bar on
compensation for foreign prisoners cannot be put in place, or if there
is a policy reason why this cannot be done, and if so, what that is? I
hope that this is a way of solving a problem that the Government have
come up against in the past and might come up against in the future,
and that they will welcome the
amendment.
Damian
Gree
n:
I rise to support the amendment and to add
one narrow but important point. My hon. Friend talked about how the
Government have suffered problems with the issue of compensation in the
past and might again in the future. I would make the point that they
are suffering from it at present. It is a continuing problem and, as
the Minister will be aware, I have asked some written questions about
the numbers receiving compensation and the levels of compensation. Tens
of thousands of pounds have been paid out recently to foreign prisoners
who have been kept in over the time of their sentence because of the
Governments inability to deport them. I know that many
taxpayers will feel that that is, at however small a level, a ludicrous
waste of public
money.
David
T.C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): I join my hon. Friend in
supporting the amendment. Does he think that there is any country to
which people cannot be deported, when the Government have shown that
when they wish to rescue people who have been fighting with Jihadi
terrorists they are able to send private jets into countries such as
Somalia at very short notice and at great cost in order to pick people
up? Yet they seem to have this inability to send violent serial
rapists, murderers and other criminals back to countries such as
Somalia.
10.45
am
Damian
Green:
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, but I think
it is slightly beyond the scope of the amendment. The wider point about
the ability to deport criminals is a difficulty that the Government
have faced and have not yet addressed satisfactorily. Regardless of the
destination of these would-be deportees, I am sure that nobody paying
taxes in this country feels that it is a good use of their money to pay
compensation to people who have been convicted of a serious enough
offence in this country to have been jailed for it, and who are also
eligible to be deported from this country, suggesting that they should
never have been here in the first
place.
Mr.
Clappison:
My hon. Friend mentions the sums that are paid
out. I cited the figure of nine defendants receiving a total of
£55,000, which by my inadequate mathematics comes out at
slightly over £6,000 per criminal. That would be a nice bonus
for a criminal. Would my hon. Friend share my interest in knowing what
these nine offenders were convicted of in the first
place?
Damian
Green:
That is exactly right. That is an extremely good
question and one that I hope the Minister can address when he responds.
Notwithstanding the deep problems that the Government are in, I am sure
that the purpose of my hon. Friends amendment is to help and to
give proper teeth to this important clause. We support the underlying
principles of the clause but we want to make it effective. We want to
get the Minister off one of the many hooks that his job entails him
being on, which is shelling out taxpayers money to people who
richly do not deserve it. I hope that the amendment can help him to
solve that
problem.
Mr.
Byrne:
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Hertsmere for
his exercise in lifting me off hooks that I find myself on in my day
job. I am enormously sympathetic to the ambitions of the amendment. The
hon. Gentleman, as a member of the Home Affairs Committee, has followed
the evidence on this question in some detail in both the evidence
sessions and the written correspondence that the director general of
the immigration and nationality directorate has
provided.
The points
that I would make fall into two halves. First, IND should not be
operating a business in such a way that results in actions being taken
that then create claims for compensation downstream. I am doing this
from memory, but I believe that those nine cases were some time ago and
it was a deficiency in INDs technical process at that time that
led to the papers being served inappropriately. That simply should not
happen. It is a further argument for much stronger oversight of the way
that IND operates its enforcement capability across its business. These
are very often situations that simply should not be allowed to
arise.
At the moment
individuals have the defence of the courts if they are being held. It
is quite permissible for somebody to apply to the AIT for an
immigration bail hearing. There are judicial remedies such as the
ability to seek judicial review or habeas corpus protection, if an
individual believes that they are being unlawfully detained. It is
perfectly possible for the individual to invoke the right of the
courts. It is down to the courts to decide whether we are detaining
someone lawfully or not. If we are detaining someone lawfully, they
will not be entitled to compensation, but if we are detaining people
unlawfully, the courts should let people out. I would like to be able
to deport people faster to certain parts of the world. However, we need
only look at what is happening in Zimbabwe, for example, to see some of
the arguments for why enforced returns are
difficult.
In my
office, we think that there are few, if any, no-go zones for
deportations. The hon. Member for Monmouth is right that parts of the
world were traditionally thought of as hard to remove to, but to where,
through the efforts of my noble Friend Lord Triesman, we are now
opening up routes back; Somaliland is a very good example. I have
recently received an enormous amount of correspondence about an
enforced charter return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
because people were saying that it is not a safe place to return people
to. However, the DRC is a landmass the size of western Europe. There
are parts of that country that are perfectly safe and where
international evidence shows that it is perfectly safe to remove people
to, but sometimes the court will arrive at a different view. That is
why the AIT
is currently reviewing whether we should be allowed
to return people forcibly to Zimbabwe. We continue with voluntary
returns, but the courts have currently put a bar on forced
returns.
David
T.C. Davies:
In his usual eloquent manner, the Minister
makes two points very well. One issue is whether or not it is possible
to deport people to certain places. I would say that flying planes into
some areas is difficult, but there are other ways of doing it. The
second, wider issue, which he raised first, is whether sending people
back to countries like Zimbabwe is morally right. It may be fairly easy
physically to send them back, but my wider point, which we should have
the guts to say, is that somebody who repeatedly breaks our
lawswho robs, rapes and commits murder, grievous bodily harm or
other violent offences that merit prison sentencesought to lose
the right not to be deported. If they then come to harm in those
countries, that is their own fault for breaking the law; it is not our
responsibility to harbour criminals in this
country.
The
Chairman:
Order. The amendment is drawn very narrowly and
is entirely to do with compensation. However mindful of the temptation,
would the Minister try to resist
it?
Mr.
Byrne:
Thank you for your guidance, Mr. Amess.
The hon. Gentleman raises a number of important arguments. I will look
for an opportunity to respond to some of his good points during the
course of the day.
The
second half of my comments are in reply to the hon. Member for
Hertsmere. He asked if there is a legal barrier to us accepting the
amendmentyes, there is. Article 5(5) of the European convention
on human rights requires provision in domestic law of an enforceable
right to compensation. However extensive my sympathy for his amendment,
to have no right of enforcement against IND when IND gets something
wrong is not desirable, because that would weaken the incentive for IND
to perform its business effectively, efficiently and justly. I think
that the amendment might set up an unhelpful set of incentives. Second,
there is the bar of the ECHR, which also provides bars on our ability
to deport people to certain torture, if not death. I know that that is
for a debate about immigration policy in the round, but some of the
protections are important and this is one of
them.
Mr.
Clappison:
I do not want to go along the path of whether
or not people should be deported in circumstances such as those just
outlined. On the question of compensation, the Minister quotes the
ECHR. I do not have the ECHR in front of me, but can he read out the
relevant provision to the Committee,
please?
Mr.
Byrne:
The hon. Gentleman is very good at such questions.
Unfortunately, I do not have the text of the ECHR in front of
mehowever, it is arriving quickly from left field. Article 5(5)
very clearly
says:
Everyone
who has been the victim of arrest or detention in contravention of the
provisions of this article shall have an enforceable right to
compensation.
Article
5 is the right to liberty and security. There are ECHR barriers that
prevent me, sympathetic as I am, from accepting the hon.
Gentlemans amendment.
Mr.
Clappison:
I am grateful to the Minister for the spirit in
which he responded. However, one could summarise the first part of his
answer as him saying that he hopes from now on that the immigration and
nationality directorate will always get things right. If nothing else,
I admire his confidence in his own abilities in that regard. I do not
want to be unkind to him, but I gently remind him that I heard his
predecessors say similar things about the IND. My recollection goes
back to 1999, when the present Leader of the House, before certain
other reincarnations, was the Home Secretary; I remember him appearing
before the Special Select Committee considering the Immigration and
Asylum Act 1999. I remember that his words were that the single most
important task that he had in front of him as Home Secretary was to get
the IND right, and to make sure that things ran smoothly in future.
With no disrespect to the Minister, I do not share his confidence that
the IND will always get things right, at least as far as observing that
every strict provision and possible interpretation of the law is
concerned, and that there will never be a case brought against the IND
in future, not least by foreign criminals claiming compensation. I
cannot accept that, with the best will in the world.
On the Ministers point
about a prisoner having the right to the remedy of judicial review,
that is fair enough; they have that remedy. They can seek judicial
review on the ground that they have been unlawfully detained, and the
courts may say that they should be set at liberty. That is one thing,
but it is altogether another for them to be paid compensation as well,
and that is where the statutory bar would come into place.
On the question of the ECHR, if
the Government would like to accept the amendment, but feel that they
cannot because of their interpretation of the ECHR, I would want to
have a very close look at the wording of that convention and the way in
which it has been interpreted by the courts. We often find in this
country that the problem is the Governments fear of the ECHR,
or their fear of an adverse interpretation of the ECHR. That leads the
Government to take a cautious view of when they would be contravening
the convention, or not. That cautious interpretation can have the
effect of the Government acting in ways that the public find
unacceptable. I am a great supporter of human rights, but I do not feel
that they should extend so far as compensation for periods spent in
custody by foreign criminals as a result of technical deficiencies,
which is what happened in the case I cited to the Committee.
I accept what the Minister
says, but I am worried that there is a tendency on the part of the
Government, which has been present throughout the Bill and which he has
done his best to get round, to introduce tough-seeming measures that
are then continuously watered down because of fears of the
Governments interpretation of the legal consequences. The
lawyers get at what the Government want to do, and it is watered down
and watered down, so that automatic deportation for imprisonable
offences becomes automatic deportation for imprisonment, which then
becomes automatic deportation for 12 months imprisonment for
certain offences. It is watered down all the way along the
line.
There seems to be a paralysis
striking the Government, who are afraid of the most far-fetched
examples of possible injustices that might mean contravention of the
European convention and other conventions. There is a worry there, and
if nothing else, I should emphasise the degree of disquiet that the
public feel at paying compensation to foreign criminals, who are the
architects of their own misfortune in offending in the first place, and
at the disparity between the treatment of the criminals and the
victims. I would be extremely interested to know if any of the victims
of the offenders whom I have quotedthe minor offenders who
received just over £6,000 eachreceived a penny piece in
compensation. I do not know the answer, but I suspect that victims of
foreign criminals do not always receive much in the way of
compensation, if any. In the light of all those matters, I will be
pressing this to a Division.
Question put, That the
amendment be
made:
The
Committee divided: Ayes 5, Noes
8.
Division
No.
13
]
AYESNOES
Question
accordingly
negatived.
11
am
(8) A foreign
criminal subject to a deportation order under subsection (5) shall be
deported not more than six months after the making of a deportation
order..
The
Chairman:
With this it will be convenient to discuss the
following amendments: No. 140, in
clause 30, page 15, leave out lines 40 and
41 and insert
(1) A
deportation order under section 28(5) above must be
made
(a) not less than
6 months before the first date at which a criminal could be released
from prison for an individual sentenced to over 12 months imprisonment;
or
(b) on the date a final
appeal has been withdrawn or determined, or the latest date on which
such an appeal could be brought, for an individual sentenced to less
than 12 months
imprisonment..
No.
10, in
clause 30, page 15, line 40, leave
out from made to end of line 41 and insert
within 14 days of
conviction..
No.
11, in
clause 30, page 15, line 46, leave
out paragraph (b).
No. 33, in
clause 30, page 16, line 6, at
end add
(4) Where a
deportation order has not been made within one month of the end of the
period specified in subsection (2) above, the Secretary of State must
write to the judge or magistrates court responsible for passing
the sentence of imprisonment under section 28(2) in order to explain
why a deportation order has not been made and what action he plans to
take..
Damian
Green:
I will speak to amendments Nos. 126 and 140, which
stand in my name; I am aware that they are grouped with others from
various hon. Friends. Both of these are essentially probing amendments
about the capacity of the Home Office to deport foreign criminals in an
effective manner.
The
effect of amendment Nos. 126 would be to require the Secretary of State
to deport a foreign criminal within six months of a deportation order
being made. I would be interested to know what systems and manpower the
Minister has in place to ensure, once the orders have been made and due
process has been gone through, that the Home Office will get these
criminals out of the country.
From our previous discussion,
the Committee will be aware that this is a continuing problem, as the
Government recognise; indeed, part of the purpose of this entire
segment of the Bill is to address that. Whatever the aspirations of
Government about criminals not staying in this country if it is
possible and desirable to deport them, it simply does not happen often
enough at present. If it does eventually happen, it is often too late
and, as we were discussing in the previous debate, after expensive
compensation claims have been made on the taxpayer.
I hope that the Committee will
hear some practicalities from the Minister this morning. No doubt he
would regard it as extremely desirable to deport a criminal within six
months of the making of a deportation order. I suspect that the general
public would feel that this was itself rather lax; I dare say that
there would be a view that, if a deportation order has been made, then
perhaps one could give a week for various things to happen, and that
six months seems a long time for someone to be herein detention
or prison, no doubt, and therefore at vast expense to the taxpayer. I
am not urging the Minister to do anything that he does not want to
dostill less, anything that the general public would not want
him to do fairly quickly. I am seeking to establish whether he would be
capable of doing this.
The effect of amendment No. 140
would be to require the Home Office to start proceedings for
deportation at least six months before the earliest release date for a
person serving more than 12 months, or on the date of a final appeal to
termination for those serving less than 12 months.
That, too, is very topical; it
relates to a problem that I am sure the Minister and his officials are
grappling with. The Home Secretary has said that it is vital to
consider deportation early in a prisoners term of imprisonment
if we are to avoid a fiasco such as that of last Maywhich led
to the sacking of the previous Home Secretarywhen we discovered
that foreign criminals were not being deported. My understanding from
the director generals letter to the Home Affairs
Committee is that at the moment the achievement seems to be that
consideration starts some four months before the end of a sentence.
Clearly, progress has been made but more is
needed.
I hope that
the Minister can enlighten us about the practical systems that are in
place. If a four-month target has been hit, what is required to meet
the six-month target in the amendment? If systems can be put in place
now, presumably they can be extended so that all future problems
relating to the deportation of foreign criminals will be minimised and
we can achieve the happy situation in which our only difficulties
concern the potential destination of the criminals.
I am aware that we have had
several exchanges about whether it is desirable to deport certain
people to certain countries, and how difficult that might be. However,
I am sure that the Minister would acknowledge that if that were his
only problem in relation to the deportation of foreign criminals, his
life would be considerably easier than it has been in the past few
months. Ministers will always have genuine difficulties in making
individual judgments about whether a person or group of people should
be sent back to possible torture or even death. However, those genuine
problems have been overlaid with the unnecessary problem of a system
that is inadequate to enable them to handle what one might describe as
routine deportationsthose of people who have committed serious
crimes in this country yet whom we find it impossible to
deport.
The purpose
of the amendments is to probe what is happening in the Home Office, and
equally importantly, what plans Ministers have to improve the
efficiency of their systems in the coming months and years. If they are
not improved, a serious threat to public order and public safety will
continue, and that would be hugely
undesirable.
Mr.
Clappison:
I support the excellent amendment tabled by my
hon. Friend the Member for Ashford, and I rise in the same spirit as he
did to seek further information about the mechanics of deportation. A
certain amount is spelled out in the Bill, but it would be an
improvement if it contained a little more
detail.
Amendment No.
33 would require the Secretary of State to write to the court
responsible for the sentence triggering deportation if the deportation
order had not been made within one month of the period specified in the
Bill. I say specified in the Bill because the Bill sets
out a certain amount about the mechanics of the system, and it is clear
that when a deportation order has been made following the triggering of
the trigger mechanism, time is allowed for an appeal against the
conviction or sentence that triggered the
order.
My amendment
would require the Secretary of State to write to the court if the
deportation order had not been carried out within one month of the end
of that period. I believe that that would have the advantage of
focusing official efforts so as to ensure an efficient process of
deportation. The amendment also gives the Minister an opportunity to
say a little more about the mechanics of the process.
More generally, there is a need
for greater communication between the Government and the courts about
what is going on with deportation. I also
think that the courts need to have confidence that when a deportation
order has been madethat is, they have recommended deportation
or passed a sentence on a foreign prisoner of a type that would trigger
deportation under the provisions of the Actit will be carried
out.
There have been
cases in which senior members of the judiciary have said that they do
not have confidence in the deportation process. I could give just one
example from last year, when the recorder of York said that he was not
going to make a recommendation for deportation in the case of a man who
had been jailed for 15 months for offences of fraud. The recorder
said:
Even if
I did, I would have no confidence that anyone would take any
notice.
We
must get back to a position where the courts have confidence in what is
going on regarding deportation. There must be communication between the
Government and the courts. I hope that the Minister will be able to
welcome the amendment.
Mr.
Byrne:
I am grateful for the chance to sketch out a little
more of this territory than I have had the opportunity to do so far. I
also respect the way that the hon. Member for Ashford is probing in
this territory. Given the events of last spring, it is absolutely right
that a degree of scrutiny is brought to bear on this area, which
includes asking whether the right level of resources is being
applied.
In direct
answer to the question by the hon. Member for Ashford, the increase in
resources in this part of the INDs business has been about
tenfold over the last year. So, about 600 or 700 people are now working
in this particular area. That increase in resources has been an
important part of the changes that the Home Secretary has made over the
last 12 months. For me, the question now is this: how do we ensure not
only that we have increased the number of people who are doing the job
but that they are able to operate a process that is far more efficient,
so that the overall productivity and output are much higher? In broad
terms, that is what the Bill is designed to achieve.
At the moment, around 72 per
cent.nearly three quartersof foreign national prisoners
that we write deportation orders for appeal against the orders.
Although 55 per cent. of those appeals end up being dismissed and a
further 25 per cent. end up being withdrawn, they involve the IND in a
long drawn out process of taking those cases through the appeal system.
What we want to do is effectively to certify the cases, so that those
appeals can be held abroad. We know that that has a dramatic impact on
the number of appeals that we receive. There is a degree of precedent
that we can learn from, which is the number of overseas appeals made
against asylum decisions; in those cases, we have certified
peoples claims as being clearly unfounded and therefore
reported them. As I said a moment ago, only 238 appeals have been
lodged from abroad in about three and a half years, between November
2002 and September 2006.
Therefore, what we have done
over the last 12 months has dramatically increased the level of
resources in this area. What we are now seeking to do in the Bill is to
increase dramatically the efficiency of the process.
Yesterday, the hon. Member for
Ashford not unfairly criticised the stream of management speak that he
hears coming from my office. I did not take offence. However, if he
will permit me one further foray into that territory, it is important
that the way that we set objectives for the IND is right and puts the
prioritisation of harm reduction centre-stage. Over the next 12 months,
I will personally oversee the design of new objectives for the IND, and
tackling harm, particularly the harm caused by foreign national
prisoners, will be at the centre of the objectives that I aim to
recommend to the Home Secretary. I hope that that is in direct answer
to some of the questions asked by the hon.
Gentleman.
11.15
am
There are a
number of technical issues that it is important to draw out. Amendments
Nos. 126, 10 and 140 create constraints on the precise date, time and
moment when the Secretary of State might issue a deportation order. It
is perfectly reasonable to expect the Home Office to undertake the
issue of deportation orders in advance and substantially in advance of
somebody being released from custody. We are currently operating at
about four months; our target is to get to six months by spring and we
are on track to hit that
target.
The problem,
however, in setting a specific point in the calendar or in the sentence
when the deportation order is to be issued is that it may get in the
way of our ability to deport people. If, for example, somebody is
serving a 20-year sentence, we would want to write a deportation order
towards the end of their sentence as the situation in that
persons country may be so unstable that if we were to try a
deportation order the court would throw it out. Waiting for a while can
sometimes help us issue a deportation order, taking into account
conditions in that country which may be more helpful. It may increase
our ability to deport people
home.
The hon. Member
for Hertsmere raised a second issue about the feedback to the courts.
There are challenges with the way that the amendment has been drafted.
We do run into issues with writing back to courts. If we do not issue a
deportation order within 30 days we end up snowing the courts
with a large amount of paper and notices, often involving information
that will cause us problems under the Data Protection Act 1998. The
necessity is not there in the way that the hon. Gentleman tries to
describe it because if we want the degree of flexibility and latitude
to write deportation orders in order to deport more people we may very
often find ourselves in a situation where we repeatedly have to write
to judges to say, We have not done it yet
because... All we are trying to do is to pick the point in
the sentence when we maximise our chances of getting people
home.
The point that
the hon. Gentleman makes is, however, absolutely right. When I talk to
immigration judgeswhich I try to do as often as they let
mevery often they do express concern about the misalignment
between the removals process and the court process. We explicitly said
in our enforcement strategy, published a week or two ago, that we would
seek to bring that alignment in. We do have to explore further measures
for feeding back news about individual cases to the
courts. One of the ways that we can do that is through the new single
inspectorate, because it is vital that the judiciary in this country
have confidence in the system so that they can continue to ensure that
justice is done.
David
T.C. Davies:
I wonder whether I can help the Government a
little with two amendments that I tabledNos. 10 and 11. I gain
the impression that the Minister is genuine in wanting to ensure that
foreign criminals are deported expeditiously wherever that is possible
and wherever the courts will allow that to happen.
Amendment No. 10 will require
that a deportation order be made within 14 days of conviction for an
offence rather than, as at present, at a time chosen by the Secretary
of State. I think that would help to ensure that matters took place
more quickly. The problem with the wording as it stands is that it
could drag on for many months, with all sorts of people putting
pressure on the Secretary of State not to carry out a deportation
order. By accepting this amendment, that pressure is removed and the
Secretary of State would simply have to issue an order within 14 days.
I think the Minister might find that helpful.
The second amendment would
remove clause 30(2)(b). At the moment, the clause states that a
deportation order may not be made while an appeal could be
brought. The problem with the words could be
brought is that, as we know, lawyers are very good at using all
sorts of means to bring forward appeals even when they know perfectly
well that those appeals will fail, and since most of them are on legal
aid and being funded at the largesse of the taxpayer, it is well within
their financial interests to do so and they will do so. Amendment No.
11 would simply remove the words could be
brought thereby removing this money feast for
immigration lawyers, who would not be able to bring forward all sorts
of bogus claims to stop an appeal taking place that was
clearly going to
fail.
Mr.
Byrne:
I am grateful for the ambition behind this
proposal. My slight concern is that, given the increased resources, we
are trying to create a process that is as rapid and efficient as
possible. Wherever possible, I am therefore seeking to minimise the
necessity to write bits of paper or issue decisions that end up having
to be revoked.
At the
moment, an individual has 28 days to appeal against a conviction. If we
were to accept an amendment requiring deportation orders to be issued
14 days after conviction, two consequences would follow. First,
somebody might appeal successfully against the conviction inside the
28-day window, and we would then have to revoke the deportation order.
That would involve resources in issuing the order and then revoking it,
but also in tracking the case in the meantime.
The second concern is that such
an amendment might limit our flexibility to issue a deportation order
closer to the end of a sentence. Sometimes when a sentence is quite
long, that would limit our ability to take into account the current
country information available. My fear is that it would jeopardise the
flexibility that we are seeking to issue deportation
orders at the right point to maximise our chances of getting somebody
home with the approval, not the blocking, of the
courts.
Damian
Green:
I am grateful to the Minister for the constructive
way in which he responded to a constructive set of amendments. We are
rowing in the same direction: we all want to see a much more efficient
deportation system than has obtained in recent years. Inasmuch as the
protections in the clause will help, we applaud them. As the Minister
observed, we were interested in their practicalities, and he responded
constructively to my concerns. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn.
Question
proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the
Bill.
Damian
Green:
I rise briefly to put on record something that I
have thought since I first read the Bill: that the title of the clause
is ludicrous. It is called Automatic deportation but
the provisions are for nothing of the sort. We are about to discuss
exceptions, which means that it is not automatic.
As the
Minister has eloquently explained, there are huge complications and
difficulties. If he were to attempt to create a system of fully
automatic deportation, he would be in breach of various international
treaties to which Governments have signed up. It is worth putting on
record my understanding that automatic deportation is
an unfortunate term, first used, I believe, by the Prime Minister in
Prime Ministers questions one week. It does not accord with the
reality of life as it is or as it will be when the Bill is on the
statute book. It is particularly unfortunate that that piece of cheap
rhetoric will find its way on to the statute
book.
Mr.
Byrne:
The clause is important and will dramatically
increase the speed with which we can deport those who have broken our
rules and abused our hospitality. There is a degree of automaticity in
it that there has not yet been in our judicial system. In particular,
it creates a clear link between criminality and a route out of the
country. The automatic issue of a deportation order is clear and the
appeal must therefore be out of country. It will speed up the system
dramatically and send a clear signal to the country and to foreign
nationals, so I commend it to the
Committee.
Clause
28, as amended, ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
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