Parliamentary Committee releases highly critical report on the Home Office's handling of the removal of foreign national offenders
Parliament's Public Accounts Committee has today released a highly critical report on the Home Office's handling of the removal of foreign national offenders.
You can read the 17-page report here.
The Committee says that since it last looked at the issue eight years ago, it is dismayed to find so little progress has been made in removing foreign national offenders from the UK.
"This is despite firm commitments to improve and a ten-fold increase in resources devoted to this work. The public bodies involved are missing too many opportunities to remove foreign national offenders early and are wasting resources, through a combination of a lack of focus on early action at the border and police stations, poor joint working in prisons, and inefficient caseworking in the Home Office. This, combined with very poor management information and non-existent cost data, results in a system that appears to be dysfunctional", the report states.
The Committee's Chair Margaret Hodge MP and Committee member Richard Bacon MP said in a press release that there has been a complete failure to improve the management and removal of foreign national offenders.
"The number of foreign nationals in prison has stayed stubbornly at around 10,000, and 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 it remains below the peak levels. This is just not good enough," the press release says.
It continued: "Processing foreign national offender cases for removal starts too late, takes too long and costs too much. At the most basic, it takes on average 32 days to send out the 50 question paper form to start the process and almost half of these forms are ignored or not returned. The approach to case working is grossly inefficient, often featuring avoidable processing delays and administrative errors. Managing the removal of foreign national offenders in prison needs to be better coordinated, particularly between immigration and prison officers."
Many news media articles highlighted the fact that report found that one in six of the 4,247 foreign prisoners who were released into the community pending removal had absconded.
The Committee says that the Home Office will need to act with urgency on the recommendations made in its report if it is to secure public confidence in its ability to tackle effectively these and the wider immigration system issues.
In response to the report, the Guardian quoted Immigration Minister James Brokenshire as saying that foreign nationals who commit crime in Britain should be in no doubt of the government's determination to deport them.
"We are also dealing more robustly than ever before with those who break our laws. Joint work with the police to intercept foreign nationals in custody suites has led to 3,300 removals since 2012, while police checks on the overseas convictions of EU nationals are up almost 600% under this government."
"Alongside tougher crime fighting measures, improved protection at the border and greater collaboration between police and immigration enforcement officers, the Immigration Act will help us to identify, remove and ban more foreign criminals than ever before," he said.