A Commons committee report blaming Britain’s membership of the European Union for the government’s failure to deport 13,000 foreign offenders was only passed on the casting vote of its chairman, Keith Vaz.
The claim that the government’s record on deporting foreign national criminals would lead the public “to question the point of Britain remaining a member of the EU” split the Commons home affairs committee down the middle, with a 4-4 deadlock broken by Vaz’s casting vote.
The committee’s endorsement of an anti-EU position on such an emotive issue was seized on by the justice minister and leave campaigner Dominic Raab, who claimed that even a leading Labour remain campaigner, Chuka Umunna, who sits on the committee, was now questioning staying in the EU. Umunna was not present when the vote was taken on the key passage in the report.
The home secretary, Theresa May, defended the government’s record and denied that Britain’s EU membership was a hindrance. “Foreign nationals who commit crimes here should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them,” she said. “Last year we removed a record number of foreign national offenders from this country, including a record number of EU criminals.
“Being in the EU gives us access to criminal records sharing and prisoner transfer agreements which help us better identify people with criminal records and, allow us to send foreign criminals back to their home countries to serve their sentences.”
The home affairs committee’s quarterly report on the immigration system also says it must “seriously question” an “extraordinary” decision by the Home Office to attempt to deport thousands of overseas students on the basis of “questionable or insufficient” evidence that they had cheated in English language tests.
Vaz said the Home Office’s “arrests, dawn raids and aggressive deportations” of students from outside the EU stood in stark contrast to the failure to remove foreign offenders.
“There are still over 13,000 foreign national offenders in the country, who could fill towns the size of Louth in Lincolnshire, Beccles in Suffolk or Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland, and almost 6,000 of these are living within communities,” he said.
“The public would expect our membership of the European Union to make it easier to deport European offenders, but this is clearly not the case, and we continue to keep thousands of these criminals at great and unnecessary expense. These failures are undermining confidence in the UK’s immigration system and in the UK’s EU membership.”
Umunna accused leave campaigners of trying to hijack the committee’s report for their own political gain. “Our partnership with countries across Europe makes it easier for us to deport hundreds of foreign criminals each year. There are clearly some inefficiencies, but there is no doubt our membership of the EU is a help not a hindrance in clearing the backlog of foreign national offenders,” he told the Guardian.
“Any attempt to portray the findings of this report as a reason to leave the EU would be wrong, deeply misleading and another example of how desperate the leave campaigns have become. As leading law enforcement heads have said time and time again, Britain is stronger, safer and better off as part of Europe.”
Raab said the report showed that the EU was making it more difficult to remove dangerous criminals. He claimed that “even the in campaign’s political champion” Umunna was now questioning the point of remaining in the EU as a result of the report.
The report highlights the fact that the two largest groups of foreign offenders in prison in England and Wales are the 983 from Poland and 764 from Ireland. About 4,000 of the 13,000 foreign national offenders are from EU countries.
The Ministry of Justice said both groups had special status and could not be sent home. No Irish prisoners, save for exceptional cases, have been sent back since a 2007 bilateral agreement that has nothing to do with the EU. There is also a block on sending prisoners back to Poland until the end of 2016 as it has an exemption under the EU prison transfer agreement because of lack of capacity in its jails.
The committee’s report says the 13,000 foreign national offenders who have not been sent home include 5,789 living in the community, more than half of them for two years or more. The number of those living in the community is the highest since 2012.
The MPs report that deportations have been steadily increasing and the 5,602 foreign offenders removed in 2015 was the highest number since 2009.
