Priti Patel, British Home Secretary, has announced plans to ‘impose visa penalties’ on Gambia and others countries refusing to accept their citizens in a fresh crackdown on peoples who are ‘abusing British hospitality.
The UK Home Secretary made this revelation in an interview with British British Tabloid, The Sun Newspaper, on Saturday January 2, 2022, where she revealed that Gambia will be the first among a list of countries that are earmarked to be slammed with the stricter measures after it ‘ignored’ calls and ‘only took four criminals’ back last year.
Patel added that other countries to be affected by the new visa penalties includes Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Cambodia and Vietnam after their records for taking back deportations were also slow.
Speaking to The Sun on Sunday, she said: ‘Some countries do not cooperate on returns and so we will impose visa penalties on countries who refuse to take criminals back.
“We rightly take back British citizens who commit crimes abroad and other countries do the same. The number of foreign criminals released from prison on to the streets reached a record high of almost 11,000. Official figures show that at the end of June there were 10,882 foreign national offenders who had been released from jail but not deported.
All are subject to deportation because they were handed prison sentences of at least 12 months. This comes as Ms Patel will be granted new powers to impose visa penalties on countries that do not cooperate on deportations, under new reforms in the Nationality and Borders Bill.
She will be able to suspend visas entirely, impose a 190-pound surcharge on applications to come to the UK or increase visa processing times – and aims to encourage other countries to cooperate with the UK government.
The UK Office of National Statistics estimated that there are 36,279 Gambia-born migrants in the UK in 2020, most of these migrants are undocumented migrants or asylum seekers who migrated to Europe through the Mediterranean Sea, otherwise known as ‘back-way’.