Prisoner Transfers: Albania

4. What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of arrangements on prisoner transfers agreed with Albania.

7. What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of arrangements on prisoner transfers agreed with Albania.

22. What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of arrangements on prisoner transfers agreed with Albania.

Our prisoner transfer agreement with Albania came into force in May 2022. Between January 2021 and December 2022, 1,441 Albanian foreign national offenders were returned to their home country from custody and the community. To build on that, we announced a new arrangement with the Albanian Government in May 2023 to speed up prisoner transfers, with an additional 200 of the most serious offenders able to be sent back to serve their sentences in Albania—good news for the rule of law and good news for the British taxpayer.

I am very grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for his work on Albania, illegal migrants and returning offenders. We pay £40,000 a year to maintain a prisoner in their cell and we do that for foreign prisoners, too. Will my right hon. and learned Friend seek to make more arrangements with other countries to return their offenders, thus saving the taxpayer money?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is an expensive business to incarcerate people. The UK has over 100 prisoner transfer agreements. We are working hard to ensure that existing PTAs work as effectively as possible and deliver value for money for the taxpayer by removing FNOs to their home countries. My Department also has ambitions to secure PTAs with new countries. We are engaging with our counterparts in target countries to advance that. I will update the House in due course.

May I, too, thank the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister for the difference the agreement with Albania is making in reducing arrivals? Germany, a member of the ECHR, refuses to even allow claims from Albanians. Will the Secretary of State therefore consider derogating from the ECHR, as German appears to have done and as we did over prisoner voting, to further build on that success?

My hon. Friend has raised an important point. In the five months to the end of May, Albanian small boat arrivals were down by 90% on last year, and we have returned 1,800 illegal migrants and foreign criminals to Albania. Thanks to changes in our asylum system, we have gone from accepting one in five Albanian asylum claims to accepting just one in 50, in line with other European countries such as Germany.

I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for the progress that he is making in the removal of Albanian prisoners from our jails. I know from my time in his Department that they make up a sizeable proportion of the foreign national offenders whom we have in custody here. Does he agree that, at a time when our prisons are so close to capacity, the return of foreign prisoners to their own countries is important to ensuring that our hard-working and skilled prison officers can focus their work on the rehabilitation of offenders who will eventually be released into their local communities here in the UK?

My hon. Friend is entirely right. I am glad that he has raised the issue of rehabilitation because, as he says, when prisons can run a full regime, the opportunities for rehabilitation are optimised. I recently visited HMP High Down to see prisoners being trained in a brand new, purpose-built warehouse. They are learning the skills that they need for life on the outside and that work is bearing fruit. The percentage of prisoners in work six months after release has doubled in the last year, and that means a better chance for them to go straight and a better chance for the community not to have to suffer from crime.

If the Secretary of State were doing a good job of returning foreign prisoners, we would expect to see overcrowding coming down, but on a recent visit to Wormwood Scrubs prison I found, increasingly, that two people were occupying a one-person cell without a shielded toilet, and that time out of cell was between one and two hours a day. If the Secretary of State is proud of his record, will he collect and publish those statistics? At the moment, his Department is refusing even to collect the time out of cell figures.

Those statistics are not published, but I thank the hon. Gentleman for going to HMP Wormwood Scrubs, because I think it is important for Members to visit prisons.

When it comes to the additional numbers in custody, the key element is the number of people on remand, which, as I have said, has risen by between 4,500 and 5,000 since the period before the pandemic. That is important, not only because those people have not necessarily been convicted of any crime and all Members should have some concerns about people being in custody for a long period, but because some have been recalled. Of course we will work to drive down the number of foreign national offenders, but, as I have said, the principal issue that we are facing at present is that of remand prisoners.

As always, I thank the Secretary of State for his answers. I know that our Ministers and our Government always maintain the highest human rights standards, and the highest standards in respect of prison conditions. Can the Secretary of State assure me that, when it comes to the transfer of Albanian prisoners, those high standards will be maintained in respect of both prison conditions and human rights?

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise this matter. Yes, we will be robust, but we will also be fair, and being fair means ensuring that basic standards relating to human behaviour and the way we treat our fellow human beings are upheld. When, as part of our robust arrangements with Albania, 200 of the most serious offenders—each costing us about £40,000 a year—are transferred there, that will happen in a dignified and appropriate way, and they will be serving in conditions with which both the hon. Gentleman and I will feel comfortable.

I call the SNP spokesperson.

The UK Government are reportedly paying jailed Albanian offenders £1,500 to return to their country of origin as part of an early release scheme. Can the Secretary of State tell us how many of those whom he has sent back have been eligible for that money, and how—given that one of them has told the BBC that he plans to come back to the UK within days or weeks of his release—he can be sure that this scheme is an effective deterrent?

Let me begin by saying that I know the hon. Lady is standing in for the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald), and we wish him an early recovery. I will write to her about specific numbers but, on the issue of early removal, it is absolutely right that, if individuals who have served a requisite period in our jails can be sent back to their home countries, we should send them there, because of the cost to the British taxpayer but also because the capacity is needed to run a full rehabilitative regime. This policy is not controversial across parties and we are committed to upholding it.