I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Removal of Prisoners for Deportation) Order 2025.
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair again, Ms McVey. As the Committee knows, when this Government came to power we inherited a prison system in crisis. From January 2023 to September 2024, the adult male prison estate routinely operated at over 99% capacity. Had we exceeded maximum capacity, the consequences would have been unthinkable: with nowhere to put new prisoners, the police would have stopped making arrests and courts would have suspended trials. It could have led to the total breakdown of law and order, with criminals running amok in our streets.
The Government carried out a series of emergency prisoner releases to prevent that disaster. At the same time, we launched the independent sentencing review with one clear goal: to make sure we never again run out of prison places. David Gauke and his expert panel published their recommendations on 22 May and the Government responded the very same day, accepting the majority of them in principle.
One specific area we asked the review to look at was how we tackle the number of foreign national offenders in our prisons. They currently account for about 12% of our prison population and cost British taxpayers millions of pounds every year. The Government have made it very clear that foreign nationals should be in no doubt whatever that the law will be enforced, and where appropriate, we will work with the Home Office to pursue their deportation. I am pleased to say that in our first year, we have removed more foreign national offenders than in the previous 12 months or in any other July to July period, but we must go further.
The draft order implements the sentencing review’s recommendations to reduce the minimum period that foreign national offenders have to spend in prison to 30% of the custodial term, and to increase the window in which they can be removed from prison for the purpose of immediate deportation. As the Committee will be aware, the Secretary of State has the power to remove eligible foreign national offenders—those serving a determinate sentence who are liable to be removed from the UK—from prison for the sole purpose of immediate deportation. That is referred to as the early removal scheme. Foreign national offenders serving indeterminate sentences—life sentences and sentences of imprisonment for public protection—are outside the scope of the scheme, and rightly so. Prisoners serving any type of sentence for a terrorism-related offence are also excluded. The power to remove a foreign national offender under the scheme is discretionary, and prison governors can refuse to remove individuals in certain circumstances, for example where there is clear evidence that the prisoner is planning further crime or dealing class A drugs in custody, or there are serious public safety concerns regarding early removal.
Under the current rules, eligible offenders can be removed up to 18 months before the earliest release point of the sentence, provided they have served one half of the requisite custodial period. This statutory instrument amends the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to allow foreign national offenders to be removed up to four years before the earliest release point of their sentence, subject to having served one third of the requisite custodial period. That means that eligible offenders can be removed from prison earlier.
At current removal rates, we expect that the change will free up approximately 500 prison spaces a year. Not only will that help to safeguard prisons from collapse, with all the risks that poses to the public; it will also prevent taxpayers’ money from being spent to keep foreign nationals in this country any longer than absolutely necessary.