The leader of the Rochdale paedophile grooming gang, who was imprisoned in 2012, is due for release. The last time the parole board met to discuss his case, it determined that he remained a danger, and it was not safe for him to release him.
Such serious foreign criminals must, on release, be deported. However, a loophole in the 1971 immigration Act prevents him, as a Commonwealth Citizen who arrived here before 1773, from being deported to Pakistan.
The Home Secretary has announced emergency legislation to close the loophole in the 1971 Act. Alas, it won’t work: Parliament can change our law, but it can’t change Pakistan’s law. Pakistan don’t want him back and they have removed his citizenship. Even, were we to secure agreement with Pakistan to return him by some triumph of diplomacy, no doubt appeals to the courts on grounds of human rights would set back any attempt to remove him indefinitely.
This is a measure of the ridiculous situation that early release schemes have got us into.
But there is worse. A whole contingent of new automatic early releases is coming our way in September under the provisions of the Sentencing Act 2026. When Parliament was considering that legislation, I voted for an amendment, together with my colleagues, which would have excluded sex offenders from the scheme. Alas, the Government defeated the amendment. This week we voted again on an Opposition Day motion, asking the Government to introduce emergency legislation to exclude sex offenders by amending the 2026 Act.
This time the Government whips simply gave up. They did not require their MPs to vote against it. The motion passed unopposed. The reason for this volteface is that, apparently, the ‘King over the water’ -our next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has expressed his support for excluding the sex offenders.
We’ll just have to wait and see what happens next, and if the Government acts. The passing of the motion is just an expression of parliamentary opinion. It doesn’t require the Government to do anything.
I suggest however, that in what parliamentary time remains before our summer recess, the Home Secretary introduces the necessary emergency legislation.
To be fair, the last government used early release schemes too, in order manage the burgeoning prison population. We only added 500 more places to the prison estate despite launching the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era. The problem is that Prisons take so long to build because of the delays in the planning system: nobody welcomes a new prison nearby, and building them remotely makes them increasingly difficult to staff.
Inevitably, until sufficient places are added, we have to actively manage early releases. But that needs to be done with discretion rather than blanket application to all offences. The Government ought to have accepted our amendment to exclude sex offenders. Now they should act with emergency measures to remedy their omission.