UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 53: 53: Clause 31, page 16, line 23, leave out ““is”” and insert ““shall be presumed to be”” The noble Lord said: As drafted, this clause excludes the courts entirely from the process of automatic deportation except in the limited circumstances specified in Clause 34. We consider that while there may be a presumption that deportation of a foreign criminal, as defined, may be conducive to the public good for the purpose of Section 3(5)(a) of the 1971 Act, it should be for the court and not for the Home Secretary to make a recommendation for deportation on the basis of that presumption, as proposed under Amendment No. 53. Amendment No. 54 proposes that the Home Secretary should have regard to that recommendation unless, under Amendment No. 55, he decides that the deportation is not conducive to the public good. While the majority of persons subject to the Clause 34 process ought to be deported, there will always be a few whose presence in the United Kingdom is conducive to the public good. I refer the Minister to Sakchai Makao, the young Thai national who had lived in Shetland for 13 years and represented the islands three times at athletic events but who was threatened with deportation after serving eight months of a 15-month sentence. My honourable friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland said: "““The decision to deport Sakchai should never have been made””." If this clause had been in force at the time, there would have been no choice in the matter. There will always be a small number of people, still with limited leave to remain after many years of living in the United Kingdom and contributing positively to their communities, who commit a one-off crime that attracts a sentence of a year or more. Some of these people would even be legitimate applicants for asylum, not covered by the restricted interpretation of Article 33, which we have just been discussing. We do not like the idea of automatic deportation or automatic penalties of any kind without judicial intervention. As my honourable friend the Member for Rochdale said: "““We are having this debate about automatic deportation because last year the Home Office failed to review and carry out deportation orders on several criminals in the system. The Home Secretary did not exercise his powers and ended up losing his job””.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/5/07; col. 208.]" As my honourable friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley said, we want the judicial oversight to be at the start of the criminal process, not left to judicial review at the very end. The Minister’s answer was that very few NSA applications had been successfully challenged by way of judicial review; that is a false analogy, as my honourable friend tried to tell him. Even though every constructive proposal we make in this Committee is rejected by the Minister, and I fully expect this one to suffer the same fate, I beg to move.