Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Baroness Mobarik and Lord German

Report stage
Wednesday 28th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, there are two sets of amendments in this group. I am speaking to Amendments 49, 53, 56 and 61, which all concern standards in places of detention. The other amendments have been tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik. From these Benches, we support all the amendments in her name and would be pleased to have been able to add our name to them.

We discussed this matter of standards very briefly in Committee, but the rules on where people can be held for detention are being altered by the Bill. Rather than following the Immigration Act 1971, which lays out clearly where people could be detained, this says that people can be detained anywhere the Minister feels appropriate. I have been thinking about a number of questions which arise from that, but clearly the issue that I am particularly concerned about is the boundary-line between where people are going to be detained—because, of course, that is part of the Bill—and where they might be placed when that detention ends and what offering they might get.

I regret to say that today we heard about the government costs for the barge in Portland: a contract has been let, without tendering, for £1.6 billion for the first two years of that contract. I have in front of me a copy of the floor-plan of that barge, and it is quite clear that the only way that the numbers the Government say will be accommodated will be achieved is by putting in bunk beds in each of the single bedrooms on the “Bibby Stockholm”. We are also led to understand, apart from the huge cost involved, that there will be curfews and that people will only be allowed on to the dockside in a compound—that is the only space they will occupy. To me, that seems to be detention. The only thing that I need to understand is whether the standards of a place of detention are going to be the same as where people are accommodated when they are not in detention. It seems that what the Government are proposing in this £1.6 billion contract is very clearly a place of security and secure boundaries. If there is a curfew when people are not allowed to leave, clearly that means that there are very strict rules that people will have to follow.

Consequently, if the Minister would ensure that the standards of the Detention Centre Rules, which have been in place since 2001, and the Short-term Holding Facility Rules, which were put in place in 2018, are going to be followed, we can expect to have at least some boundary-lines about what sort of accommodation it will be like. However, I fear that the worst aspect is that we are going to see a dehumanisation of people by being put into places which will not suit the current legislation and certainly will not suit what most people would think of as somewhere decent for people to be detained or to live.

I ask these questions to seek some clarity. Are there any rules at all which the Government are going to follow in relation to the detention of the people they now propose to detain, with everybody being put in detention when they arrive?

[Baroness Mobarik (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 51, 57, 59 and 63 in my name, which retain existing time limits for the detention of children, both unaccompanied and those with families.

Under a Conservative-led Government over a decade ago, Parliament rectified what David Cameron called the scandal of routinely detaining innocent children, so it is regrettable that we are conducting this debate again. The evidence is unequivocal, the debate long since settled: detention does immense and long-lasting harm to children.

I made my points at Second Reading and in Committee, so I shall not repeat the arguments other than to remind my noble friend the Minister of warnings of leading medical organisations in a letter to the Home Secretary outlining the serious harm and risks that refugee children will face if the detention powers in the Bill become law.

There is no policy rationale for why the Government should detain vulnerable young people. The argument is that not detaining children would lead to adults pretending to be children or smugglers exploiting loopholes. But preventing presumed future actions of an unknown number of adults is not a justification.

My noble friend the Minister has recognised the particular vulnerability of unaccompanied children, and for that I thank him. He told us in Committee that, for the most part, unaccompanied children will not be detained. Yet any such exceptionality of a lone child’s detention is nowhere in the Bill. Indeed, the proposed legislation expressly does away with the existing statutory provisions that limit an unaccompanied child’s detention.

In fact, the new powers to detain them are unrestricted. Under the Bill, unaccompanied children may be detained under the new powers only in circumstances prescribed in regulations. We do not know what will be in these regulations or when we will see them. While I thank my noble friend the Minister for the positive step in making the unaccompanied children regulations subject to the affirmative procedure, there is still no knowing what circumstances will be specified in them.

The law governing something as extreme as the power of the state to detain an individual without charge or trial must be much more firmly established. In Committee, my noble friend the Minister said that

“the Bill will also allow the Secretary of State to make regulations specifying time limits to be placed on the detention of unaccompanied children for the purpose of removal, if required”.—[Official Report, 7/6/23; col. 1491.]

I remind noble Lords that the Bill does away with precise time limits, as established by a Conservative Government, that keep unaccompanied children’s detention to no more than 24 hours and only in short-term holding facilities. The Bill will replace existing limits with a power, if required, to make regulations with any as yet unknown time limits on detention and of unaccompanied children only. To my mind, this is wholly insufficient.

I turn from the Government’s possible future time limits in regulations for unaccompanied children to the promised government timescale for child detention. This, we are led to believe, is a timescale for detention of all children—those who are unaccompanied and alone as well as those with their families. The timescale was to be set out during the passage of the Bill through this House, but as yet we do not have it. However, following a very positive engagement with the Immigration Minister earlier today, I am hopeful that we will have clarity and that my amendments will receive consideration on return to the Commons. For that reason, I am minded to test the opinion of the House on Monday.

In October 2020, a Kurdish-Iranian family from Sardasht near the Iraqi border died after the boat they were travelling in capsized in the channel. They were Rasoul Iran-Nejad, 35, Shiva Mohammad Panahi, 35, Anita, nine, Armin, six, and Artin, 15 months, whose tiny body washed up on the coast of Norway months later. I am sure that noble Lords will join me in continuing to mourn the loss of these lives. If these three children, Anita, Armin and Artin, had survived, under the Bill they would be detained indefinitely upon arrival in the UK. Surely that cannot be right. I urge the Government to think again about undoing the progress made when we ended the cruel practice of detaining babies, toddlers and children.

We can and must do better by these vulnerable young people whom the world has already put through so much. Trafficked and refugee children need recovery and protection in line with their rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, trafficking conventions and the refugee convention. Let us not take away the existing time limits for the detention of migrant children as laid out by a previous Conservative Government. The ending of lengthy child detention was a humanitarian response to what had been an unacceptable practice with grave impacts. This is a proud legacy that we must protect.