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The Mail is trailing some sort of “crackdown” on deportation cases because of unspecified “loopholes”. There are several problems with this... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8443181/Priti-Patel-mount-crackdown-foreign-criminals-loopholes-let-2-000-dodge-deportation.html
The heart of the story seems to be a drop in the number of deportation orders served, from 5,218 in 2015 to 3,225 last year. But this is not because of “loopholes” preventing action, this is the Home Office not even trying to deport people in the first place.
Serving a deportation order is easy and the Home Office isn’t even doing that. Serving the order is only the first step in a deportation. Actually then physically removing the person from the country is harder as that’s when the legal challenges start.
The stats suggest the number of actual deportations is fairly constant, in fact. But only because the Home Office is plumping up the numbers with low risk EU nationals. Look at these charts I did for my book…
One shows the number of high harm removals declining since 2010.
The other shows the number of EU nationals being deported increasing from a very low base to well over half of all deportations over the same period.
This is an old article but the real reasons I describe for deportations being difficult remain https://www.freemovement.org.uk/does-the-human-rights-act-prevent-us-deporting-serious-criminals/
Returning to the Mail article, there is no need for a “crackdown” if the “failure” is even serving deportation orders in the first place. I’ll finish with three possible explanations for the actual issue, which seems to be nothing to do with legal challenges.
One is that the Home Office is belatedly acting with some humanity and restraint. We’ve seen deportation of people brought to the UK as small children or even born in the UK. I’ve seen no such change in behaviour at the Home Office, though.
Another is that the Home Office is becoming more incompetent at serving deportation orders. With funding diverted to other areas and perhaps being less well run than in the past, this is perfectly possible.
Finally, might it be the case that there are less foreign criminals in the UK now because lots of repeat offenders have already been deported? Or that foreign nationals are not committing as many serious crimes as before because some worry about the risk of deportation?
Anyway, if you are interested in this, I’ve written a whole chapter about deportation in my general interest book about our immigration system, which is out on 29 June and can be pre-ordered now https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/welcome-to-britain
