Enforced removals and deportation by charter flight 2016-18
Dear Home Office,
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I ask you to provide me with the following information regarding charter flights leaving the UK from January 2016 to May 2018.
If you are not able to provide me with the information from this entire period, please provide me with information until the end of December 2017, or the most recent possible date. If information for 2016 is not available, please provide me with information for 2017 only.
Please supply the dates and destinations of all charter flights for this period. For each of these flights, please state:
A. The operational name of the flight.
B. The number of Removal Directions issued for the flight
C. The number of people removed (Males, Females and
Children).
D. The number of people withdrawn from the flight, through last
minute legal actions or fresh representation or withdrawn for
any other reasons.
E. The number of criminal deportations on board. If this information is not available, please provide any information you have on the percentage of criminal deportations on charter flights, broken down by the flight or monthly.
Thank you very much for your time.
PS: I note that this information was exactly that requested by Thomas Avery for an earlier period, and to which you replied in full. (https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/e...)
Yours faithfully,
Alex Scott
Alex Scott,
Thank you for contacting the Home Office with your request.
This has been assigned to a caseworker (case ref 48932). We will aim to send you a full response by 05/07/2018 which is twenty working days from the date we received your request.
If you have any questions then please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
P. Zebedee
FOI Requests
Home Office
Dear Alex Scott
Please see the attached response to your Freedom of Information request.
Regards
Immigration Enforcement Secretariat
Dear Immigration Enforcement FOI PQ,
Thank you for answering this request on time.
I would like to check one point that is not clear in your answer. Part E of my question asked for "the number of criminal deportations on board". Could you confirm: do the numbers you have given in the column on "criminality cases" in your reply refer to people who were actually removed on the planes, or to all "criminality cases" issued removal directions?
Yours sincerely,
Alex Scott
Dear Alex Scott
After taking advice from the business area that deals with these cases, I can confirm the data presented in the criminality cases column in the answer refers to people who were actually removed on the planes which I believe answers the request originally posed.
Deportation is the way in which a person is removed from the UK if he/she has been convicted of a criminal offence, or his/her presence in the UK is otherwise not conducive to the public good.
Removal is when the person no longer has any legal right to be in the UK, and when his/her appeal rights have been exhausted. This is typically when a person:
• is refused ‘leave to enter’ at a port (land, sea or air);
• has entered the UK illegally (for example if they came in the back of a lorry);
• has overstayed his/her leave (for example, remained longer than a visa allows);
• has breached conditions attached to his/her leave;
• is a dependent family member of any of the above.
We try to avoid the use of "deportations" as this terminology often gets confusing for those outside of the Home Office as it is a specific set of removal type and can result in varying answers.
Regards
Immigration Enforcement Secretariat
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