UK Borders Bill

I shall concentrate mainly on the four amendments tabled in my name, but let me first comment on what was said by the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney), who made a powerful case. When the rights of the victim are balanced against those of the offender, it is clear that the victim’s rights should come first. I am sure the Minister agrees with that, but—coming fresh to the matter—I am puzzled by the response that the hon. Gentleman received from the Home Office, which told him that owing to a number of legal restrictions his constituent could not have the required information. Given that we have been through a phase during which the Government were prepared to circulate posters and leaflets about hooligans who had received antisocial behaviour orders, and were making a virtue of naming and shaming people who were guilty of what I suspect were, in this context, relatively minor offences, and given that anyone who will be subject to deportation under the Government’s proposals must have been convicted of an offence and been in prison for more than 12 months—and must therefore have been convicted of a very serious offence—I feel that the hon. Gentleman made a good case for the new clause, or a similar measure. We need an appropriate balance which gives more weight to the victim’s rights than the current arrangement as explained to him by the Home Office. I hope that the Minister, who will have seen the new clause on the amendment paper for some time, will be able to respond positively to his hon. Friend. Amendment No. 8 would add to those considered for automatic deportation people who have committed immigration offences. As it stands, the Bill provides for what it calls automatic deportation, but I think it was widely agreed in Committee that that is a misnomer. It is automatic deportation except when it is not automatic, and that means a huge number of exceptions. The deportation provision applies to foreign prisoners who are sentenced to more than 12 months in jail, yet the Bill itself sets the punishment at 51 weeks for the new immigration offences that it creates. That means that anyone committing an offence under the terms of the Bill would not be subject to the part of it that provides for what it calls automatic deportation, which strikes me as perverse. It is not credible that a Bill that purports to protect our borders excludes from its own provisions automatic deportation of those who commit serious crimes against immigration officials and those who seek to enter this country illegally. As it stands, the Bill sabotages its own effects. I am sure that the Minister will say, as he did in Committee, that a dim view will be taken of people discovered in the UK illegally and that the chances of their being allowed to stay will be limited. However, the Opposition believe that a strong message needs to be sent: ““We will stop you if you try to come to this country illegally, but if we cannot we will catch you and send you away again quickly.”” Previous mistakes in that regard are the main cause of problems in the entire immigration system. The number of asylum seekers has dropped considerably in recent years, mainly because of the end—thankfully—of wars on the continent of Europe, but there is a huge overhang in the system, which is one the main problems the Government face. We want to prevent anything similar from happening in the future, if there should again—God forbid—be large-scale movements of refugees across Europe, which would inevitably end up with hundreds of thousands of people coming to this country, as we have found in the past. That is the purpose of amendment No. 8. Amendment No. 14 would require the Secretary of State to make a deportation order at least one month before the end of a prisoner’s sentence and would provide for that person to be deported within six months of the order being served. The Minister assured us at earlier stages of the passage of the Bill that he had the right systems and manpower to ensure that the deportation system would work better in future than it has in the past. He said that resources in what was the IND and is now the BIA—the immigration and nationality directorate and the Border and Immigration Agency for those who are not keeping up with the fast-moving world of Home Office acronyms—had increased tenfold over the past year. The amendment is designed to probe whether the Home Office’s systems will ensure the deportation of the individuals it wants to deport, precisely because the scandal that cost the still immediately previous Home Secretary his job arose in part because of the inability of the Home Office, the Prison Service and other agencies to communicate and work together to get those people, who are serious criminals, out of the country. One fears that with the split in the Home Office, which we discussed in previous business today, those communication problems are likely to get worse, as the Prison Service has been even further removed from the ambit of the immigration service. The situation will certainly not get better and it may get worse, so the need for the amendment is even more urgent now than when we discussed it a few weeks ago in Committee. The amendment would ensure that arrangements were already in progress when an individual neared his or her release date, to make the whole process smoother and more efficient. Amendments Nos. 9 and 10 and Government amendments Nos. 17 to 22 relate to exemptions from automatic deportation and share a common interest. We want to achieve the same things. At present, people who have been handed a suspended sentence are exempt even if they serve some of the sentence, and the amendments would close that loophole. We wanted to delete subsection (1) of clause 37 in its entirety, but the Government want to do that in another way. I am sure the Minister agrees that if a person is handed a suspended sentence he has committed a crime of some seriousness in the first instance. The suspended sentence is activated only when somebody is in trouble for a second time and is, therefore, by definition a repeat offender, so it seems entirely reasonable to us that such a person should have the hospitality of this country withdrawn from them. I am glad that the Government have once again shown flexibility in the wake of the discussions in Committee and that they agree with us on that point. I hope that the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) will speak to his amendment No. 2, which also deals with exemptions from automatic deportation. Under clause 32, people are exempt if they are under 18 when convicted and, as I understand the right hon. Gentleman’s amendment, he wants to focus on the date of the offence rather than the date of conviction. I have a degree of sympathy with Ministers on that point, as clearly they need to select one event as the cut-off point for the exemption. None of the options is perfect, but the advantage of using the date of the offence is that it will seem fairer. Justice can occasionally take a long time, so it is not difficult to imagine a situation where two 17-year-olds might commit a crime on the same day but one might be deported because his case took longer to get to court and he had passed his 18th birthday, while someone committing the same crime on the same day would be allowed to stay in the UK because he received justice more quickly. Such a hypothetical situation is not difficult to imagine; nor is it difficult to imagine that the public would find it somewhat unfair.