15. What progress his Department is making on the use of prisoner transfer agreements to allow the removal of foreign prisoners. (141254)

We are working hard across Government to remove foreign national offenders from this country. Last year we removed more FNOs under prisoner transfer agreements than the year before. We recently made our first transfer under the European Union PTA and signed a compulsory PTA with Albania, which is the first time we have done so with a high-volume FNO country.

Have any agreements been reached with any countries recently?

They have. We signed the agreement with Albania earlier in January, which is very recently indeed. We hope that we will start making returns under that agreement very shortly. As I have said before, it is important that the agreements, wherever we can negotiate them, are compulsory prisoner transfer agreements so that prisoners do not have the choice about going back.