COMMONS AMENDMENTS (Hansard, 19 July 1984)

§ Lord Elton

My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth agree with the Commons in their Amendments Nos. 3 and 4. Amendment No. 3 gives effect to an undertaking that I gave to your Lordships on Third Reading. It was then suggested that the Secretary of State should have wider discretion to waive recovery of the travel costs of a prisoner transferred to the United Kingdom. Your Lordships felt that circumstances could arise in which it would be wrong to extract payment from someone who had been imprisoned abroad, and had in mind a situation similar to that of the American hostages detained in Iran. I said that we accepted the principle of widening the Secretary of State's discretion to waive recovery, and would consider a Government amendment to this effect. The new subsection (3) of Clause 7 meets the point by allowing waiver because of the exceptional circumstances of the case, as well as because of the prisoner's means and the impracticability of recovery from some other source.

At the conclusion of the Third Reading debate on 10th April, I referred to anxieties expressed at the Report stage about the provisions in Clause 7 relating to recovery of prisoners' travel costs. I said that we intended to consider the possibility of those provisions being made somewhat more explicit in the Bill, but reserved our position on the merits and feasibility of this. New subsection (2) in Amendment No. 3 makes it clear that where recovery of a prisoner's travel costs before transfer is not feasible, an undertaking to repay after transfer will be acceptable, in the same way as undertakings to repay are signed by stranded British tourists who receive financial assistance from consular officials abroad. By virtue of the final words of subsection (2), such an undertaking could be accepted from either the prisoner or anyone else willing to accept liability for payment.

We have not been able to go as far as some noble Lords (including, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon) would have liked, by providing that costs could be recovered from relatives only at the prisoner's request. We feel that such a provision would be too restrictive. I hope, however, that noble Lords will accept the repeated assurance that has been given, that there will be no question of putting pressure on prisoners' relatives to pay the travel costs. Amendment No. 4 is consequential on the amendments to subsections (2) and (4), since the new subsection (2) speaks of securing payment rather than recovering expenses. My Lords, I beg to move.

§ Lord Mishcon

My Lords, it would be churlish to do anything else but express gratitude for the distance that the Government have gone in regard to this matter, which troubled many of us and, as the noble Lord the Minister was kind enough to say, which also troubled me on behalf of my noble friends. We were so anxious that the spirit of this Bill should be kept and that, because of lack of means or because of the feeling that 1687 this was too heavy a liability to bear due to commitments to family or whatever it might be, no one who bore our nationality would have to say "No" to a chance to be repatriated.

All I can do, apart from expressing gratitude to the Government for having gone partly down this path, is to express the hope that the directions which go out upon this matter will make it as gentle as possible for prisoners to undertake this liability, since they may find it difficult to do so, even though it could be shown in a formal document that financially they are just about able to meet either the whole of the expense or some part of it. With the plea to the noble Lord the Minister that such a directive will go out and that the spirit underlying the carrying out of the clause will be as I believe the Minister as much as I would want it to be, I have to say that obviously we agree with the amendment.