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Immigration: Deportation

Volume 473: debated on Monday 17 March 2008

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department further to the letter of 17 December 2007, from Lin Homer, Chief Executive of the Border and Immigration Agency to the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, what criteria have been set to prioritise the immigration cases of individuals who are deemed to pose a potential threat to the public; how many such cases have been identified; and how many of the individuals concerned have been deported or otherwise removed from the UK. (177324)

As Lin Homer wrote in her letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee on 18 February 2008, the

“need to remove the most harmful people first is reflected in the Case Resolution Directorate’s priorities and processes”

All applicants and their dependants aged 10 and over are checked against the police national computer (PNC) to establish whether these individuals have criminal convictions in the UK before a decision is made. Where it is identified that the individual has been guilty of serious criminality, we prioritise consideration and seek to deport them in accordance with the Agency-wide criteria.

As at the end of November 2007, we had concluded 52,000 backlog cases, of which, around one third (16,000) were removals. A detailed breakdown of the reasons for these removals, including whether they related to evidence of serious criminality could be obtained by examination of individual case records, only at disproportionate cost.