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The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)
I am delighted to have the opportunity today to draw attention to the issue of children in immigration detention. The UK’s policy of detaining children with families in order to effect their removal from the UK is an area of long-standing concern for many organisations that take an interest in immigration and asylum, and for organisations that work on behalf of children. Those concerns are significant, and the Government have, very early on, set out their commitment to ending the detention of children for immigration purposes. We want to replace the current system with something that ensures that families with no right to be in this country return in a more dignified manner.
To help bring that about, the UK Border Agency is leading a comprehensive review of present practice on the detention of children. It will look at the actual levels and at how to prevent such detention by improving the current voluntary return process. The review will also consider good practice in other countries, and will look at how a new family removals process can be established that protects the welfare of children and ensures the return of those with no right to remain in the UK. It will come as no surprise to you or to the Chamber, Mr Weir, that in the current climate the review will also have to include value for money as part of its remit.
The review has already begun and its phase of collecting views and submissions will run until 1 July. It will take in the views of a wide range of partners, experts and organisations that represent the interests of children to create viable long-term solutions. Earlier this week, I went to Glasgow to discuss the matter with many voluntary groups. They made extremely useful inputs to the review, so we will be repeating those meetings in all regions and in other countries of the UK over the next few weeks.
The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund is helping the review by co-chairing a working group made up of a range of non-governmental organisations, and I am grateful to the fund for agreeing to do that. We are seeking to identify how the UK Border Agency can fulfil its role while taking the right account of children’s safety and welfare. We are carrying out the review as fast as humanly possible, so that the detention of children for immigration purposes can end and a practical alternative be put in its place.
I should emphasise that the UK Border Agency is fully determined to replace the current system with something more humane, without compromising on the removal of people who have no right to remain in the UK. We are talking about alternatives to detention and not about ending removals. Until the review is completed, current policies will remain in place, with one exception. As Members will know, the detention of children overnight at Dungavel immigration removal centre in Scotland has been ended as a precursor to such a practice ending across the UK. Currently, a very small number of children—fewer than five—are being held in immigration detention, but before we close Yarl’s Wood for the detention of families we need to find effective alternatives.
Damian Green
I will of course give way to the newly elected Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs.
Keith Vaz
I thank the Minister very much for letting me intervene. I welcome this review, which is very much in keeping with the report the Select Committee produced last November. One of the recommendations was for the then Government—clearly, it is now for the new Government—to look at the role of local authorities. Will he confirm that local authorities will be consulted? The Committee was concerned that councils were sometimes not aware of children in their jurisdiction, and that that led to some children absconding and councils simply not being aware that they had gone.
Damian Green
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and I take the opportunity formally to congratulate him on his election—his reappointment, rather—as Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee. I can do so with a due degree of objectivity because I was not allowed to vote in the election, so he can neither thank nor blame me. I am sure we will have many constructive exchanges in the coming years.
To address the right hon. Gentleman’s point, the simple answer is yes. I mentioned earlier that I had had a meeting in Glasgow at which the city council played a significant, helpful and constructive role. The purpose of the consultation is for it to be as widespread as possible. As he said, local authorities will have statutory responsibilities for such children and will therefore have views about how best we can and should proceed, so I will very much welcome their input into proceedings.
The challenge is to develop a new approach to family removals that remains cost-effective and delivers the return of those who have no right to remain in the UK. I hope I will not be constraining the review if I identify some of the factors involved; indeed, I hope this will help those who wish to contribute. It is already clear from the initial stages of the review that there is not a single, simple remedy: it is not just about ending detention at the stroke of a pen. There may have to be—I think there will have to be—a number of changes at different points in the system, each contributing to the overall aim. Clearly, there is a need to achieve faster and better decision making on family asylum cases; we are already taking forward work on that. We are told there is a need for greater confidence in the initial decision that is made in asylum cases. I take on board that message; indeed, I may even have transmitted that message to Government in the past.
In a recent report, the UK Border Agency’s independent chief inspector, John Vine, commented favourably on the commitment to quality, and the UK is felt by many countries to have good systems in this regard. Members may know that in 2007, the provision of early legal advice was piloted in Solihull, in the west midlands, to test whether collaboration between the legal representative and the UK Border Agency decision-maker led to better information at the initial decision-making stage, so that better quality decisions could be reached. The findings were unclear, so we are working with the Legal Services Commission and key asylum partners to test those principles across an entire region of the UK Border Agency. It is called the early legal advice project, and it is an example of collaborative working and trying new things that I hope will characterise this area of alternatives to detention for families.
Another thing to consider is the need for better contact management and more active discussion of a family’s options if their claim is rejected and their right to appeal a decision has been exhausted. Discussions with a family might need to be backed up by improved support from NGOs, partners and other workers. The options open to families at present include some very generous assisted return packages, but the take-up rate for families is low compared with that for single asylum seekers. There is, therefore, a need for better marketing of those assisted return offers. Marketing may sound like an odd word in this context, but I use it because we should not be forcing the take-up of such offers. Better explanation and promotion of the offers is clearly needed; they are real offers to provide help and assistance when all the other options have been exhausted. To illustrate one apparently small but important point, the assistance includes help with excess baggage so that families can take with them belongings purchased in the UK. They would not be returning home empty-handed, and would have more to show for their migration journey and for their time in the UK.
I think that everyone involved would also like to see a clearer and more evenly managed process after applications and claims to remain have been turned down. The starting point—and what I hope will become the standard—would be a much more clearly identifiable transition from a voluntary departure to an enforcement approach that is shaped by the family’s own approach to their situation. The UK Border Agency would therefore set removal directions while the family is in the community, giving the family time to submit further representations and to apply for a judicial review if they wish to do so, as well as giving them time to make plans for their return. The arrangements would place a greater emphasis on self check-in or escorting to the airport. That approach, which already exists but possibly in a less clear way than it ought to, gives families every chance to comply with the need to return home without enforcement action. Making it much clearer to families—and their helpers—where they stand at this stage of the process seems to me to be necessary.
Other changes to processes may be called for, but inevitably some families who have no justification to remain in the UK will always refuse to leave voluntarily, despite all the encouragement we give them to do so. A changed approach should, and I hope would, minimise the number of those families, but there will remain difficult cases where solutions have to be found and where enforced removals are likely to continue. That approach could involve separating different members of a family and reuniting them before departure, so that some family members stay in the accommodation they are used to. However, I recognise that that approach would be hugely contentious and has its own practical difficulties. Therefore, in some cases we may still have to have recourse to holding families for a short period before removal—where keeping the family together is seen as being in the best interests of the children, which of course must be the paramount concern.
I hope it will not come to that. The Government and the UK Border Agency would much prefer that families who do not require humanitarian protection or refugee protection return to their home countries voluntarily. That is a responsible approach in a world where the number of people who choose to live in another country, for a variety of reasons, is continually expanding. Not everyone’s journey will be a success in economic terms; not everyone’s journey will be lawful. We believe that the Government should respond in a responsible, fair, dignified and humane way to this reality.
Keith Vaz
I thank the Minister for giving way to me for a second time. Will he comment on the report in The Guardian today that the Government are considering a reintegration centre—basically, a detention centre—of some kind in Afghanistan for families who are due to be removed from this country? Is that report correct, or wrong?
Damian Green
I would always hesitate to describe a report in The Guardian as being completely accurate. The proposed centre in Afghanistan is not particularly a British Government project; indeed, the previous Government raised this idea with other European Governments and with international agencies. The proposed centre’s purpose is, effectively, to have a retraining centre—a re-entry centre—in Afghanistan, which the right hon. Gentleman will know is the source of many unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in this country, so that there is something for those children to go back to that will enable them to lead a better life in Afghanistan. I suspect he agrees with me that it would be much better for those young men to have a decent life and some hope in life in their own country. If they can have those things, that will stop many of them making dangerous—in some cases, sadly, fatal—journeys halfway across the world to try to reach Britain or other European countries.
So the basis of the report in The Guardian, for all that I said in my initial response to the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention, is true, but it is being presented in a luridly and unfairly hostile light. The centre is an effort to help people. I suspect that the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), the Opposition spokesperson, will agree with that, because she was in government when the then Government originally suggested this process. It is a constructive and creative response to the problem of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and to present it in any other light is straightforwardly unfair. It is a constructive idea and I hope it comes to fruition. The tender for the operation is being examined, and we hope to make an announcement in the next few months about what will happen next.
This is a real, worldwide problem and as I was saying, we believe that the Government should respond in a responsible, fair, dignified and humane way to the reality of what is happening around the world today. The review into ending the immigration detention of children is an important part of that. Obviously, we will not take any firm decisions until the review has completed its work and we have taken into account the views that are put to us. I hope that during this debate, more ideas will be put forward that the Government can feed into the review, which may therefore give us what we all want to see: a fairer and more humane system that ends the system of detaining children for immigration purposes in this country.
Damian Green
I am grateful for the unanimous support for this policy from all sides of the Chamber.
Damian Green
Absolutely. This is the second time this week that something has happened to me that I suspect will never happen again. I attended the Citizens for Sanctuary summer party where, as the new Minister for Immigration, one expects to get brickbats, but instead I was given a bouquet. I suspect that that will be the last time, so I thought that I would enjoy it while it lasted. This debate is a metaphorical conclusion of that experience.
I am grateful to hon. Members from all parties for their contributions. The only comment that verged on the slightly churlish was the conclusion reached by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who was attempting desperately to find splits in the coalition. I am extremely pleased and proud to be advocating our policy, which was in the Liberal Democrat manifesto. The hon. Lady will toil in vain if she seeks to find splits in that area.
A number of important practical points were raised and questions asked in the debate, and I will now deal with those. First, let me say that I was remiss in not thanking the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch for all the expertise and personal kindness that she showed when she was in government and I was in opposition.
The right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) rightly mentioned the review by the Home Affairs Committee. As he said, he recognises many of the ideas that the Government have put forward, as many were mentioned in past reviews by that Committee. I look forward to further expert contributions from the Committee. He also went through some of the statistics for children in detention, which I think bear greater examination. He mentioned the figure of just over 1,000 for the number of children in detention in 2009. If that annual figure is broken down, one finds the slightly depressing fact that the numbers go up as we go through the year: the figure for the third quarter is higher than that for the second or first quarters.
As the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch said, the central difficulty is about what should be done at the end of the process if a family simply refuses to go. Detention under the system that we are getting rid of was not necessarily effective. Of the 1,068 children who departed from detention in 2008-09, only 539 were removed and 629 were released back. There are clearly difficulties with the efficacy of removal and with taking away detention as an option—something that we are doing for all the reasons that have been advanced during the debate—but even with detention, more children were released back into the community than were removed. The old system was not particularly effective, and I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Leicester East for stating the actual figures, as they illustrate that fact tellingly.
Meg Hillier
Will the Minister confirm that those who were taken out of detention were never brought back into detention so as to be removed from the country again, or indeed removed from the country by another route?
Damian Green
I am not entirely sure that I understood that question. Is the hon. Lady saying that those who were eventually removed had never been detained and then released, and then detained again and later removed? Is that what she is saying? The honest answer is that I do not know. I was not the Minister at that time. She was. If she says that that is the case, I am grateful for the information.
Many hon. Members have mentioned Yarl’s Wood and other detention centres. I have visited Yarl’s Wood on several occasions, and in my experience the regime got markedly better over the years. Last time I visited, a functioning school was in operation and so on, and it was a much more humane place than it had been in previous years. I pay tribute to the Ministers who were involved in supervising that, as well as to the staff of the UK Border Agency who made sure that it happened. I suspect that we have all had the same experience. However, even when that place was in its most humane phase, it was still disturbing to see children locked up behind bars. That is one of the things that impels our policy.
There was mention of children at Harmondsworth. I may have misunderstood the right hon. Member for Leicester East, because it is my understanding that there are and were no children held at Harmondsworth. If I have misunderstood, I apologise, but I thought that he had said that there were.
Damian Green
I am grateful for that clarification. The position was not entirely clear.
The point was rightly made about access to local authority services. Local authority social services are embedded at Yarl’s Wood; they are there permanently.
My final point about the statistics is that the figure was more than 1,000 and it is now five, so we are doing our best, even in the interim phase while the review is going on, to keep the numbers to an absolute minimum.
Various Members on both sides of the Chamber brought up the issue of delays, which lead to problems in the system. I think that I was being invited by the right hon. Gentleman to give a new time scale for the end of the legacy. Given all his experience, he will excuse me from making such commitments in my second outing at the Dispatch Box, but he will know, from having sat through many of these debates with me in the past four years, that like him, I have been very exercised by the problem of delay.
I dare say that those who were Ministers in the previous Government would not dissent from the basic proposition that the long delays embedded in the system lead to many of the associated problems that we see. Bearing down on those delays and getting rid of the old legacy, as it has been called, as fast as possible is clearly a high priority. That will have beneficial spin-offs throughout the asylum system and, indeed, the wider immigration system.
At various stages, the debate drifted into a general immigration debate, and it is perfectly reasonable that the same points apply in that context. The fewer delays we have, the more likely we are to avoid the problems that we have seen, although it is a fair point—it was made by Ministers in the previous Government and will be made by me—that not every delay in the system is caused by the system. Not every delay is caused by the border agency. Some delay is caused by the legal processes that people have the right to go through and do go through.
Ms Abbott
On the question of delays, one thing that successive Ministers in the previous Administration never understood is that if we, in a panic—usually occasioned by the tabloid press—bear down on one aspect of the system, all that does is displace pressure to another aspect. That is why we were never successful in dealing with delays overall. We bore down on one thing—Romanian ladies in headscarves—and then got a bulge of children who claimed to be 18 but were not. So I beg, in a non-party political way, for a strategic, all-embracing approach. That in the end will produce the desired result.
Damian Green
I agree with that point and will seek to take the friendly advice that the hon. Lady offers across the Chamber in that regard.
Gavin Barwell
Does the Minister agree that one of the other reasons for delay and one that causes great frustration to UKBA staff is the difficulty of returning people to certain countries? Will he work with colleagues at the Foreign Office to see whether we can secure improved arrangements in that regard?
Damian Green
Absolutely so. The whole Government are working very hard to ensure that those who have no right to remain here are returned to their countries of origin. My hon. Friend, who has huge expertise already in this matter, representing Croydon Central, will have noticed that when the Government and the UK Border Agency have some successes in that regard, it is not universally popular. We are being criticised this week for resuming returns to Iraq, but that has to be part of the process; otherwise, the process will silt up.
Let me make some progress, as I am conscious of the time and there are many questions to answer. A point made by various hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) and the right hon. Member for Leicester East, was about resources. The right hon. Gentleman will be aware of the state of the public finances left by the Government he supported for 13 years. As a result, there will be difficulties. All I can sensibly say is that the management of resources is as important as the quantum of resources. That is one of the things that the new Government are most eager to get to grips with as fast as possible, and we shall be doing so as part of the general spending review.
Various hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch, asked about the Glasgow pilot. She will know that it encourages refused asylum seeker families to return voluntarily by providing intensive support, which is focused on helping families to confront issues that delay a return and building up skills to prepare for a voluntary return. Thirty-two families have been referred to the Glasgow pilot; 11 have been accommodated there. I am afraid that nothing has changed in that regard since the hon. Lady left office. No families have elected to return voluntarily to their home countries, and enforced departure has taken place of three families who were initially accepted into the project. However, she and I need not despair at this point, because one of the things that I learned when I was in Glasgow earlier this week was that the fact of that project has spread awareness of assisted voluntary return much more widely among the various communities—she will be aware that there are large numbers of such families there—which in itself has led to a significant surge in applications for voluntary return. The availability of that process and the information on it is quite heartening in terms of the wider review that I am conducting. The more aware we can make families of the existence of voluntary return, the more they seem to be interested in it. It is a difficult set of options before the Government, but that is one of the heartening points that should be made.
I will attempt to answer all the questions the hon. Lady asked. On Dungavel, in the one or two cases that occur now, the families are moved to Yarl’s Wood, so that is the only place where they are being held. The problem is lessening slightly as I progress through this speech. I have now learned that only three children are in detention at the moment at Yarl’s Wood. She asked, as others did, about local authorities. Clearly, the local authorities with the most expertise, whether we are talking about Croydon, Kent or Hillingdon—the ones that people would expect to be involved—will play a significant role in the review, but I take her point that other local authorities will need to be informed.
The hon. Lady asked about community organisations. One reason for trying to get out as much as possible is to engage not only the national end of the various organisations that are most concerned with either the welfare of children or, specifically, families in the position that we are discussing, but the organisations on the ground around the country, so that they can contribute their considerable expertise to the review.
On assisted voluntary return, the hon. Lady makes the point that we are living in a time of spending stringency. All I can sensibly say at this point is that, as she knows, in the long run nothing is as expensive as detention. Building and maintaining detention centres is more expensive than providing people with packages to return voluntarily, so if all goes well, the net effect on the public purse will also be beneficial.
The hon. Lady asked about the legal advice that I am receiving. All I can say gently is that I do not remember her ever sharing the legal advice that she received from Home Office lawyers when she was standing at the Dispatch Box. That was a very good habit of hers, which I intend to take up.
I am grateful to all hon. Members who contributed to the debate. It has been extremely constructive. This is not necessarily an easy problem to solve, but we all agree that it must be solved. We cannot go on with the system that we had in the past. The final big question was when we shall finish the review. The report will be on my desk in the early weeks of July, and I shall proceed with all possible speed after that to come to a full conclusion.
Question put and agreed to.