Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I support the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and especially his last remarks on where this clause gets us. On a number of occasions in this House we have debated the problems posed in prisons by foreign national prisoners, particularly in regard to deportation, because deportation is part of their sentence. It is not something that has to be waited for or applied for; it is in the sentence. It has always seemed extraordinary to me that the deportation process does not take place during the period of the sentence so that, when the sentence comes to an end, the prisoner makes one move from the prison to the airport and out. At the moment, because the deportation is not being processed during the prisoner’s time in prison, he is moved at the end of his sentence to a deportation centre or to an immigration centre—not the same place at all; prison rules do not apply there. The people who run these immigration centres tell me that up to 50 per cent of the people they have there are ex-prisoners awaiting deportation. If you go into the reasons for the various disturbances in places such as Yarlswood and Harmondsworth, you find that many of them were provoked by these frustrated ex-prisoners not knowing quite what is happening. I had hoped, in the context of a Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, that the Government would take the opportunity to clarify that and make it certain that procedures were in place; namely, that administrative procedures of deportation should be completed before the end of the sentence, so that there is no delay in the deportation process. As currently drafted, I cannot see that this clause will do anything to help either the prison or the immigration authorities to deal with their problem. It is certainly not going to help the addition to overcrowding caused by having foreign prisoners hanging about while waiting for something other than a sentence to be administered in this country.