asked Her Majesty's Government:

What action they have taken following the Statement by the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality on 19 July (HC Deb, col. 28WS) that the police, Crown Prosecution Service, courts and prisons depend on self-declaration of nationality to ensure that United Kingdom citizens and other persons exempted from deportation are not deported or detained (under Immigration Act powers while deportation is considered), whether immediately after the end of their imprisonment following conviction for a crime, or through re-detention after release.[HL7268]

As the Statement of 19 July indicated, the Home Secretary has identified eight priority areas to be addressed in order to improve the effectiveness of arrangements for deporting foreign national prisoners. The second of these priority areas is that there is currently no legal requirement for prisoners to provide evidence of their nationality, or consistent processes for nationality to be recorded. Before the summer, staff in IND and the criminal justice agencies worked together to design possible ways of addressing this gap, including a new legal requirement. A programme of activities is currently in hand, managed through the Office for Criminal Justice Reform, to test the options with frontline staff across the criminal justice system and to examine their feasibility and relative merits, in order for recommendations to be produced by the end of October.