Conclusions and Recommendations
1. There has been very little progress in
removing foreign national offenders from the UK, despite firm
commitments in 2006 to remove more and a substantial increase
in resources to do so.
When this Committee reviewed the management and removal of foreign
national offenders in 2006 it found systemic failure. The Home
Office treated the detention, release and deportation of convicted
foreign national criminals as separate, uncoordinated operations,
and there was poor communication between the bodies involved.
In 2006 the Home Office committed to comprehensive action to improve
arrangements for the deportation of foreign national offenders.
But it has failed to achieve this and little sustained progress
has been made. At 31 March 2006 there were 10,231 foreign nationals
in prison. At 31 March 2014 there were 10,649. The number of foreign
national offenders removed from the UK peaked at 5,613 in 2008-09
and has not matched that level since. Indeed the figure fell to
4,539 in 2011-12 and despite an improvement to 5,097 in 2013-14
remains below the 2008-09 levels. This is despite the fact that
the number of staff working on foreign national offender cases
has risen from less than 100 in 2006 to over 900 in 2014. We are
not convinced by the argument put forward by the Home Office that
the lack of progress is due to the inherent complexity of the
system and overall policy framework and an increase in the number
of appeals by foreign national offenders. It is difficult to see
how the removal of foreign national offenders can be a genuine
priority for the Home Office given that the issue did not feature
in one of its business plans until 2013.
Recommendation: The Home Office should set
out how it will improve the management of foreign national offenders,
the specific measures against which it expects to be held accountable,
and the progress it expects to make against each measure in the
future. We expect to see significant progress in managing and
removing foreign national offenders by the end of 2015.
2. The Home Office still lacks the data it
needs to manage foreign national offenders effectively. This
Committee pointed out in 2006 that the Home Office did not have
the key data it needed to manage foreign national offenders and
that there had been inconsistencies in the evidence provided to
the Committee. Very little appears to have changed in the following
eight years. The Home Office admitted that its data are still
incomplete, poor in places and does not support decision making.
It could not answer some of our basic questions during the evidence
session on matters such as the reoffending rates of foreign national
offenders discharged from prison and living in the community.
Furthermore, on key areas of concern, such as the number of foreign
national offenders released into the community without being considered
for deportation, data are incomplete. The Home Office does not
know the costs of managing and removing foreign national offenders,
and so does not know which interventions or processes are most
cost-effective. Our recent report Reforming the UK border and
immigration system found very similar issues across other
Home Office areas.
Recommendation: The Department needs to
fundamentally rethink what management information strategy it
needs, including identifying the data it needs across all its
immigration information systems. It must then act to implement
the required changes without further delay.
3. Opportunities to prevent foreign nationals
committing offences and going to prison are being missed. The
risk of foreign criminals entering the UK undetected is
increased by the lack of data at the border on crimes that have
been committed overseas. Furthermore, police forces have been
slow to recognise the importance, when arresting foreign nationals,
of checking their immigration status and whether they have a criminal
record overseas and they rarely use search powers to find evidence
of identity and nationality. Only 30% of foreign nationals arrested
were checked against one key overseas database for a criminal
record in 2013-14, and the great majority of police forces do
not have automated links between fingerprint machines in their
police stations and the Home Office's immigration databases. At
least £70 million a year could be saved if police forces
made better use of the information available on these databases.
Operation Nexus, a pilot to improve the identification and removal
of immigration offenders, shows promise but it has not been rolled
out across police forces, despite the idea first being considered
in 2007. We are also concerned that the Home Office chose to delay
publication of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and
Immigration's report on Operation Nexus for 5 months after he
had completed it.
Recommendation: The Home Office, working
with the police, needs to make much better use of existing information
from overseas and at home, to prevent more potential foreign national
offenders from entering the UK, to ensure all arrested foreign
nationals not entitled to remain in the country are removed, and
to help other criminal justice bodies better manage foreign national
offenders throughout the system.
4. Processing foreign national offender cases
for removal takes too long and costs too much.
There are unnecessary delays in starting the process for removing
foreign national offenders. At the most basic, it takes on average
32 days to send out the 50 question paper form and almost half
of these forms are ignored or not returned. The Home Office has
not been making a decision on whether to deport foreign national
offenders until 18 months before their earliest removal date from
prison, even though it has not needed to apply this limit to individuals
sentenced after 2008. The approach to case working is grossly
inefficient: 20 of the 52 cases reviewed by the National Audit
Office had avoidable processing delays, including 7 where the
Home Office did not work on the case for an average of 76 days,
and a further 6 cases where delays were caused by administrative
errors. The Home Office accepts that the reason for failing to
remove a foreign national offender in a third of cases was caused
by factors within its control. We found the position to be worse.
In many other cases factors which the Home Office classifies as
outside its control are actually due to its own poor management
and case working practices, such as where flights are missed or
cancelled.
Recommendation: The Home Office and the
Ministry of Justice should undertake a full review of the end-to-end
process for foreign national offender removal, focusing on where
procedures can be streamlined and made more efficient.
5. Managing the removal of foreign national
offenders in prison needs to be better coordinated.
There are 14 designated prisons where immigration officers work
with prison officers to remove foreign national offenders earlier
in their sentence. But a lack of coordination between immigration
and prison officers can reduce opportunities to speed up foreign
national offender removal. For example, in one prison visited
by the National Audit Office immigration officers and prison officers
could not use each others' IT systems because of different levels
of security clearance. The Home Office has not evaluated whether
the use of designated prisons is working or represents value for
money. Indeed the impact of focusing immigration offenders in
a small number of prisons means that some prisons with large numbers
of foreign nationals have no coverage from immigration officers.
Recommendation: The Home Office and the
National Offender Management Service should evaluate whether designated
foreign national offender prisons result in more early removals,
and if so extend their use. While this work is ongoing both organisations
should make a renewed effort to ensure that within each designated
prison, immigration officers and prison officers work together
as if they are a single team.
6. Schemes designed to remove foreign national
offenders from the UK have not delivered the required results.
There are a number of schemes through
which the government can facilitate or encourage a foreign national
offender to leave the UK by the end of their sentence, but they
are having limited success and there are over 5,600 foreign national
offenders still in prison, immigration removal centres or living
in the community after the end of their sentence while the Home
Office continues to try to deport them. Only 37% of the foreign
national offenders removed in 2013-14 left as part of the Early
Removal Scheme. Take up of the Facilitated Returns Scheme, which
offers foreign national offenders financial incentives to comply
with the deportation process, has almost halved from 2,432 in
2010-11 to 1,347 in 2013-14 after the Home Office reduced the
amount payable to participants. In addition, very few foreign
national offenders are transferred under Prison Transfer Agreements
to their home country to serve the remainder of their prison sentence.
Most of these agreements are voluntary and rely on the consent
of the foreign national offender which is often refused. Transfers
between EU states will no longer require this consent from the
end of 2014, but many EU countries have yet to implement the EU
Prison Transfer Agreement. For instance, Poland, which has a large
number of foreign national offenders in the UK, will not be required
to receive compulsory transfers until December 2016.
Recommendation: The Home Office needs to
assess which schemes work best in removing foreign national offenders
early and quickly. The Department should revisit its current assumptions
and expectations so that policy and resource decisions are evidence
based, and reflect both political and practical issues.
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