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UK Borders Bill

I may have misheard the Minister, but I thought he said that something in this clause obliged the Secretary of State to take a certain course of action. I do not know quite how that could have come about, if it did, because the very first line of the clause includes ““may””. However, I wanted to mention something rather more important at this point. I understand that current deportation practice, combined with the current acute shortage of prison places and overcrowding in prisons, is leading to serious practical problems in the detention centres. In some of them, apparently, some 50 per cent or more of the people there are criminals, some of them serious and violent. That is causing problems, because the detention centres were not designed to hold people of that character, and it is having unfortunate repercussions on the other people there who may be totally innocent of any crime. I must ask whether Clause 35 will actually improve the current situation, and secondly whether things could be arranged so that deportation would follow semi-automatically where a court has recommended that that should happen.