3 days ago
‘Deport now, appeal later' is proof we haven't learned from Windrush
The Windrush scandal ought to have sounded a warning about what happens when you deport people without due process.
Claudius was allowed to stay in the UK after being minutes away from being put on a flight at Gatwick airport in December 2014, without a right to an in-country appeal. He recently settled a six-figure sum from the Windrush Compensation Scheme. Others have been brought back to the UK at huge cost.
Being able to deport people is the right of a government but, sadly, the debate has become more emotive than evidence-based. 'Deport now, appeal later' – the drive to deport non-British nationals who commit crimes before they can appeal against their removal to their place of origin – is being expanded. The scheme will now cover 15 more countries, including Canada, India and Australia, bringing the total to 23, nearly three times more than the original eight. And I fear we're heading for another Windrush-style scandal.
In recent times, there have been stories of heinous crimes committed by foreign national offenders, and of spurious claims for avoiding deportation. Stories about deportations being thwarted by cats or a fear of foreign chicken nuggets are the headlines – but they're never the story.
Behind each case is a complex set of circumstances involving family life in the UK and what happens to people on return to countries, often ones they don't know or have ties to. UK laws make it mandatory to deport anyone sentenced to more than 12 months in prison.
A Brazilian client of mine, who was saved from deportation after we intervened on his behalf, had been sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment when his car, involved in a collision which caused whiplash, was found to have a mechanical defect. I am not downplaying the seriousness of his offence, but I weighed up his sentence with that of the finding in the Lammy review that non-white men receive disproportionately higher sentences for the same offence. His partner was heavily pregnant, he had no previous convictions and he worked full time.
On the 2019 deportation charter to Jamaica, a young man who had lived most of his life in the UK, including in care, was deported after a conviction for driving offences. I don't condone his offending, nor that of three brothers convicted of GBH. But that two who were British were able to remain in the UK while one whose paperwork failed was deported in his 30s to a country he last saw when he was two years old suggests something is very wrong with a system that is quick to deport people who have lived most of their lives in the UK – and, in some cases, even people who were born in Britain.
Then there is the question of whether the people for whom a prison sentence means deportation should ever have been sent to prison at all.
There are almost 98,000 people in UK prisons – just under 4,000 are women. Yes, the prison system is at breaking point but as someone who spent two years working in women's prisons, the majority of women I encountered were victims of drug and domestic abuse, suffered mental health problems and had very few opportunities and multiple complex needs on the outside.
Prison does nothing for these women, yet here they are, outnumbering the number of foreign national offenders who might be deported. We understand the number to be under 1,000, but no one has posited alternatives to imprisonment for women, and some men, as a way of making savings.
And what of the 1,000-plus British people in prisons abroad in countries that could decide to send them back to the UK, cancelling out any savings? The idea that this is about savings is hard to understand in isolation from a discussion on wider sentencing and prison reform.
And if there are considerable savings to be had, this can only be one policy criterion. Surely victims of crime expect to see offenders punished in some way. Whatever the details of the scheme, it is inevitable that most people won't be imprisoned in their home countries, many of which have weak capacity and conditions. The UK has stopped the extradition of people to countries with poor prison conditions.
The existing early release schemes could be made to work while providing some justice for victims. A list of countries added to the early release scheme involves countries not known to produce many foreign national offenders in the UK, so unless the new ideas are merely political, it is hard to see at this stage what might be achieved. And if we start removing people before they have a chance to exhaust both their criminal and immigration appeals, I suspect we'll be bringing some back – at huge cost.
