Illegal Immigrants

(asked on 22nd October 2014) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to deport illegal migrants to their home country.


Answered by
James Brokenshire Portrait
James Brokenshire
This question was answered on 5th November 2014

We have recently legislated in the Immigration Act 2014 to make it harder for illegal migrants to remain in the country undetected and to encourage people to leave of their own accord. The provisions include implementing a penalty for those landlords who rent property to immigrants without leave in the UK, denying free access to most secondary healthcare in the UK to illegal immigrants, requiring banks to check against a database of known immigration offenders before opening accounts, introducing new powers to check the immigration status of applicants before issuing a driving licence and revoking the driving licences of those migrants who have overstayed, and introducing new powers to clamp down
on those trying to gain immigration advantage by entering into a sham marriage or civil partnership.

We have also used the Immigration Act to streamline the process of enforcing the removal of illegal migrants when necessary. We have reduced the number of appeal rights from 17 to 4, and set out clearly in primary legislation the right balance on Article 8 rights, to prevent individuals from playing the system. We have also streamlined the process of serving immigration decisions to reduce bureaucracy and further accelerate the system.

We also introduced on 1 January 2014 new regulations allowing us to prevent the re-entry to the UK for up to 12 months of EEA nationals who are
removed for failing to exercise treaty rights, unless they have a valid reason to be here.

These measures support and enhance our immigration enforcement capability, with teams operating on a targeted, risk-based approach across the country to detect and remove illegal migrants. This effort has also been given fresh impetus with the break-up of the UK Border Agency and the creation of a focused Immigration Enforcement operational command.

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