Foreign National Offenders (Exclusion from the UK) Bill — House of Commons, 2016-03-11
Topic: Law and Crime
David Nuttall (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure, as always, to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), who brings to the debate his own inimitable style and has demonstrated once again this morning his expertise on the whole issue of justice and home affairs, particularly the issue of foreign national offenders I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) for picking up the baton at short notice and moving the Bill’s Second Reading on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). He did so with great skill and demonstrated his own considerable expertise in this area. I am delighted to be one of the Bill’s supporters, because there is no doubt that it attempts to deal with a major problem that is of great concern to my own constituents My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough, in whose name the Bill stands, has demonstrated his considerable know-how in navigating the procedure for private Members’ Bills. The fact that he has managed to ensure that his Bill is at the top of a very long list of no less than 67 Bills set down for consideration today is evidence of that My hon. Friend should be commended for his perseverance with the Bill, because it is almost a year ago to the day—6 March 2015—when a previous version received its Second Reading. He noted at the time that he hoped that after the 2015 election, which was looming in the minds of all hon. Members a year ago, a Conservative Government would renegotiate the terms of our membership of the European Union and consequently make the Bill unnecessary, and that its proposed measures would be one of the red lines in the renegotiation As history has shown, my hon. Friend was right that a Conservative majority Government would be elected, but sadly he was wrong that they would insist that these matters would be a red line in the negotiations. Indeed, we now know that absolutely nothing was agreed in the negotiations to stop the free movement of people, which includes, of course, the free movement of foreign national offenders from within the European Union One reason my hon. Friend promoted the Bill again is the sheer scale of the problem of foreign-born individuals who commit crime in this country. I am not trying to suggest that everyone who comes here commits crime. It is all relative, and the scale of immigration into this country naturally brings with it an increase in the number of foreign national offenders According to figures provided by the House of Commons Library, between January and December 2014 there were approximately 5.3 million people with non-British nationality living in the UK, and a total of 8.3 million people who were born abroad. It is further estimated that, on top of that, some 25,800 asylum seekers entered the United Kingdom in 2014, and they were part of approximately 632,000 long-term international immigrants who entered during that year. On top of that are all those who are in the country illegally. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to be precise about the number of illegal immigrants, but there are many of them and, by definition, every single one of them has broken the law, because they have broken the terms of the Immigration Act 1971, as we heard last week on Second Reading of the Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill It is, perhaps, not surprising, given the huge number of foreign nationals living in our country, that some of them turn out to be wrong ’uns or bad apples. Each year, the Metropolitan police alone arrest, on average, 230,000 suspects, of whom 70,000 are foreign nationals. Only last month, the Daily Mail reported the staggering administrative costs involved in dealing with the arrests of foreign nationals, including the cost of interpreters It reported: "Scotland Yard has arrested 11 people claiming to be from Dahomey—a West African nation which ceased to exist from 1975." That highlights the importance of checking, on arrest, the actual background of those arrested. The bill to the taxpayer for providing translators for suspects, witnesses and victims was £6.8 million between April 2014 and April 2015. The analysis by the Daily Mail showed that the translation bill worked out at an average of £100 per arrest of every foreign national Figures released following a freedom of information request showed that 227,535 people were arrested by the Metropolitan police in 2014, the latest year for which full figures are available. Of those, 159,294 were British nationals, and the remaining 68,241 were born abroad.