Member

This amendment would undermine our ability to deport serious violent and persistent foreign national offenders, and I therefore cannot support it. Replacing the unduly harsh threshold with a new, lower reasonableness test would open the doors to litigation to determine the parameters of what could be considered reasonable. It fails to adequately reflect public interest in the deportation of foreign criminals. There is an easy way to avoid that conflict in the first place: do not commit the crime. Self-evidently, if you do not commit the crime, then you will not be facing that. I cannot accept the amendment because it lowers the threshold. For that reason, I respectfully ask the noble Baroness to withdraw Amendment 136. I cannot accept it under any circumstances, and I hope she can accept the explanation on Amendment 187, which I think is unnecessary for the reasons I outlined.