The damning finding that that there has been no improvement in the deportation of foreign prisoners strikes at the heart of Theresa May’s reputation as a tough home secretary who gets the job done.
In the eight years since Labour’s Charles Clarke was forced to resign as home secretary over the failure to even consider the deportation the 10,000 foreign prisoners that account for one in eight of the inmates in overcrowded jails in England and Wales.
In Clarke’s case, 1,013 foreign nationals had been released without being considered for deportation and his successor, John Reid, famously declared that the Home Office was not fit for purpose when he tried to tackle the problem. The number leaving the country each year doubled on Reid’s watch from 2,856, to 5,613 in 2008/09.
May came to office vowing to tackle the “scandal” of foreign prisoners, egged on by rightwing tabloids screaming that Human Rights Act-wielding judges were deliberately blocking the removal of foreign rapists and criminals.
May even famously tried to kickstart her own leadership bandwagon with a Tory conference speech promising to deport an illegal migrant whose removal had been blocked by the courts on article 8 – right to family life – grounds because of his cat. It was a claim that was to prove factually inaccurate.
Now the National Audit Office, has revealed that despite employing nearly 10 times the number of Home Office staff to tackle the problem, the number of foreign prisoners has actually gone up from 10,231 to 10,649. At the same time the numbers being removed each year has gone down under May’s watch to 5,097, in 2013/14.
It is an ignominious record for a home secretary who has consistently exploited the issue with its toxic mix of rapists, foreigners and human rights for all its political capital. Yet a quick reading of the NAO report shows that the same old bureaucratic problems remain from Clarke’s day.
The spending watchdog reveals that 1,453 attempted removals of foreign prisoners failed last year, and at least a third of them could have been avoided through better co-ordination of the departments involved and fewer administrative errors.
That means the Prison Service and the UK Border Agency are still failing to talk to each other on the issue. And even when they do, they’re getting it wrong. In a sample of 50 cases, the NAO found when the Prison Service did tell the Home Office that a criminal had been jailed, the form either had the wrong date for their earliest possible release or it was missing altogether.
The idea that it is all the fault of the Human Rights Act that foreign prisoners can’t be deported has long been discredited. It was shown in 2010 that no more than around 100 cases out of the 5,000 sent back each year are blocked on the grounds of a right to a family life. In most cases, they involve offenders who have been born abroad but grown up in Britain and have little or no remaining relatives in their home country.
The number of foreign prisoners who have absconded is no different from the British prisoners that the authorities lose track of once they have finished their sentences. Most are assumed to have left the country.
Prison authorities have tried all sorts of schemes to reduce the number of foreign inmates. They have even offered to pay for a new prison to be built in Jamaica to house the large number of drug mules who have been jailed in Britain.
The issue illustrates that it is one thing for “tough” home secretaries to make populist pledges but another thing to actually sort out the problem. May would have spent her time better trying to help the justice minister, Chris Grayling, sort out more pressing problems in prisons, such as the rising tide of violence and suicides.
