Labour’s plan to expand its “deport now, appeal later” policy is undoubtedly a good idea. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced that the policy, under which foreign offenders are deported to their home countries and can appeal by videolink, will swell from eight countries to 23. Given that the UK has developed an acute shortage of prison cells, such an initiative is long overdue.

The problem that Cooper is trying to solve sits right at the intersection of the two biggest issues facing Britain’s justice system: the shortage of prison places, and the ever-lengthening backlog in the courts system.

Both Labour and the Conservatives must share the blame for those. New Labour added tens of thousands of new crimes to the statute book between 1997 and 2010, and the Tories — alongside the Liberal Democrats during the Coalition years — followed that up by shutting over a dozen prisons without opening adequate replacements.

Former chancellor George Osborne deserves much of the blame for the courts backlog, as it was his decision to spread his cuts over vital parts of the state rather than make deeper cuts to welfare, pensions, or the sacred NHS. But the hugely increased criminal code he inherited from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown still plays a role.

The result of British politicians’ love of tough sentencing and loathing of prison-building means the UK now has a vast shortage of cells, while the backlog has created a system where, even once convicted, a foreign national offender could spend years waiting for their appeal to be heard. This is very bad news, because they continue to use up precious space in British prisons until the whole process is exhausted.

To borrow from the parlance of the NHS, they’re bed-blocking. The most obvious benefit of “deport now, appeal later” is that it gets them out of the system. It might also bring down the cost to the taxpayer, although presumably they will still need British lawyers — at British prices — to fight their appeal.

Of course, the announcement is not the measure. Ministers can announce all sorts of things, sometimes more than once, but what matters is results. Shadow Justice Minister Robert Jenrick has suggested that some of the countries on the new list may not cooperate. One might expect the Government to square the other countries involved before making the announcement, but that isn’t always how things work these days.

If these countries don’t play along, the ball will be back in the Home Secretary’s court. Jenrick has called for Keir Starmer to “suspend visas and foreign aid” to countries which don’t cooperate — perhaps on the model used by Australia, which designates citizens of countries which refuse deportations as “return risks” and makes it very difficult for them to obtain Australian visas at all.

That would be a very sensible policy, not to mention a way to leverage a narrow intervention to free up prison space into a broader policy which could make a significant difference to the larger problem of mass immigration. It would also be wise for Cooper to announce it before she’s forced to. Having pledged to start publishing country-of-origin data for foreign-national offenders, she will inevitably come under irresistible pressure to start making policy based on it — most obviously, when it comes to the visa regime.

Acting now would offer the Home Secretary and the Government a chance to receive the credit. If they have to be dragged towards a new policy kicking and screaming, they won’t.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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