Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 92: 92: Clause 27, page 19, line 17, at end insert— ““( ) For the avoidance of doubt, there is a rebuttable presumption that any prisoner liable to removal will be removed from the United Kingdom following his release without prejudice to any existing rights not to be, or protections from being, removed under British or European Union law.”” The noble Lord said: We come now to Clause 27 and the removal of foreign nationals. I hope we can have a constructive debate, because I think we share the Government’s approach to this matter. There are over 10,000 foreign nationals in prison in the United Kingdom at the moment, which is a substantial percentage of the total number of those in prison, although deportation went up last year. The figure quoted in another place was that last year 2,784 prisoners were transferred out. The right honourable gentleman Mr Hanson said in November that we were on target to meet the Prime Minister’s aim of removing 4,000 prisoners from England and Wales that year. I do not know if the Minister can tell us whether that target was met. It may be a bit early to reach any conclusions, but plainly the Government are keen to increase the number of prisoners who are sent back to their country of origin or to some other place beyond our borders. Interestingly, some nationalities are represented quite powerfully in our prisons. I understand that there are more than 1,300 Jamaican prisoners, over 1,000 Nigerian prisoners, nearly 500 prisoners from Vietnam, nearly 400 from Somalia and around 375 from China. Some countries have a particularly large number of their nationals in prison here in the United Kingdom. We have, as I understand it, agreements with 97 countries to repatriate prisoners to serve sentences in their home countries. These countries range from Albania and Australia to Venezuela and Ukraine. However, I believe that it is a condition of those agreements that the prisoner has to agree to leave the United Kingdom to serve his or her term of imprisonment in his own country. Those agreements are of some importance but they operate only with the co-operation of the prisoner. We cannot, under one of those agreements, force somebody to go back to their own country and serve their term of imprisonment there. The thing that is exercising me is to what extent the problems we face in this area are legal problems and to what extent they are administrative problems. As I understand it, there are two locations where most of these foreign prisoners are housed—Bourne Hall in Essex and Canterbury Prison in Kent. They are dedicated exclusively to housing foreign nationals who have not yet completed their sentence and foreign nationals who have completed their sentence but who have been detained pending deportation. It is clear that we face a much more difficult problem with those prisoners who are members of EU countries than in other cases because, as your Lordships will know, various rights under EU treaties give citizens from other member states rights to enter and remain in this country for an indefinite period. There is a certain futility about deporting this class of prisoner because they can come back the next day under EU treaties. But of course that does not apply to those who are not citizens of the EU, and it is on those that we need to focus in this debate. It is plain that there has been discordance between the immigration authorities and those who are responsible for the management of prisons about the movement of these people, particularly regarding when they are likely to be released from prison. The authorities have been extremely slow to act to ensure that anybody who is liable to deportation is properly monitored before the appropriate measures are taken. I want to be clear how confident your Lordships' House can be about the measures that the Government wish to put in place. With those introductory remarks, I beg to move.