Immigration Bill

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hylton (CB)]

My Lords, at Second Reading I said that indefinite detention without charge was completely repugnant to public opinion in this country. Therefore I welcome Amendment 216 and other amendments in this group. It is hard to imagine a subject which calls out more loudly for review than this one. My noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, with his long experience of inspecting official institutions, pointed out very strongly that for years now we have been subject to drift on this very subject. We have excuses, palliatives and promises, which have fairly seldom been fulfilled.

It may help if I give some figures on the length of time that people have been held. During the full year 2014, 857 people were held for longer than six months, and by the time that those people had been released, 26 had been detained for between for between two and four years and one person had been held for over four years. Of course, these figures do not include those held in prisons under immigration powers. Of the 161 people who were released after more than 12 months, only 70 were actually removed from this country, while 86 were granted temporary admission, temporary release or bail. That throws some light on the seriousness of how things have been running lately.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly intervene to support the speeches that have been made thus far in favour of these amendments. In doing so, I will return to something my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham said earlier on about the inappropriateness of our procedures. It seems that the cart and the horse have been confused here. Why did we bother asking Stephen Shaw to carry out his review and examine these procedures while we were steamrollering through legislation? Surely we should have waited for that review in the first place.

The terms of reference for the Shaw review were interesting in themselves. They were to “review the appropriateness” of the Government’s,

“policies and practices concerning the welfare of those who have been placed in detention, whether in an immigration removal centre or a short-term holding facility, and those being escorted in the UK”.

That goes to the very heart of this legislation. Surely it would have been wise to await the findings of that review before the other place considered this legislation, and before we in Committee were asked to look at 64 recommendations and consider which of those could be incorporated in amendments, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said before.

Stephen Shaw called for a complete overhaul of the Rule 35 process, a supposed safeguard against the detention of victims of torture which—as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, implied in his remarks earlier on—he said is not working. That something as serious as people who have been subject to torture is now being addressed in amendments to legislation at this stage shows again the inappropriateness of the procedures we are using.

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[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I find myself once again in a minority of one in the Committee, but I am reassured that I am not in such a minority in the country as a whole.

The Bill and these amendments should be considered in a wider context. The removal of immigration offenders is central to the credibility of any immigration system. Furthermore, detention is an essential component of the removal process. Of course it is undesirable for people to spend long periods of time in detention, but in practice that is not the outcome of a majority of cases. The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, mentioned some statistics, but there are others from the same year, 2014. About 30,000 people were detained in that year, but 63% were detained for less than 28 days, of whom 37% were detained for less than seven days. Only 11% of those detained spent more than three months in detention and, of those, 62% were eventually removed from the UK, which suggests that those cases were among the more difficult ones and that detention was necessary to achieve removal.

Individual cases vary enormously. I do not think anyone would favour pregnant women being held in detention, but any specific time limit would be an invitation to those concerned and their lawyers to game the system. Let us not forget that 50% of all those who claim asylum in this country are in fact refused, and that includes those who have made an appeal and have lost it. That is the average over the past 10 years, so broadly speaking we are talking about a significant number of people who the immigration courts have decided no longer have the right to be in this country. Those are the people we are talking about here.

Those who attended the Second Reading debate will have heard the most eloquent intervention by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, in which he stressed the complexities of the issues and the fact that detention is permitted only where there is a reasonable prospect of removal. That is the case law and he set it out clearly, and it seems to me a reasonable approach to this issue.

There are of course other entirely different approaches to reducing the time spent in detention. One example is to have effective returns agreements with third countries and to combine those with dedicated resources for enforcement so that the entire process speeds up. Meanwhile, any significant reduction in the use or indeed the prospect of detention could only encourage people to stay on illegally in the hope, and even the expectation, that they could dodge removal. Finally, we cannot be blind to the extraordinary events that are taking place in southern Europe. This is surely not the time to weaken our capability to return economic migrants to their countries of origin.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, given that my noble friend has placed a great deal of reliance on public opinion and how he thinks public policy should be shaped, and given that he has cited figures from 2014, has he had a chance to reflect on the figures produced by the House of Commons Library about the cost of running detention centres in the way we are at the moment? The cost was £164 million in 2014, while the cost of keeping one person in a detention centre is £36,000 a year. In addition, £15 million was paid out in compensation for illegal and unlawful detention. Surely he would agree with those of us who have been putting an alternative point of view that it is an issue which needs to be tackled at a fundamental level.

[Lord Green of Deddington]

Yes, I certainly agree that detention is a very expensive business in all circumstances; that is true. The people I would be most concerned about are those who plan to come here as economic migrants and who would have no right of asylum. They are the people who need to be deterred. It is not so much public opinion; it is having an asylum system which is seen to be effective. By all means, people who have been tortured need to be dealt with, but it would surprise me if many were actually in detention. They would not be there if their cases had not been heard and refused by the immigration courts.

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[Lord Keen of Elie]

The clearest answer I can give is that it is a matter for consideration at present by Ministers. They will consider it because they have already said that. They noted the recommendations in Stephen Shaw’s report. They have not yet determined in a black and white way that they will implement all 64 recommendations and no one would expect them to have done so in this timescale, but they will address them.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, has probably exhausted that line of argument for the moment. However, he was also asked during the debate not whether there are few or many but how many pregnant women are in detention centres at present, what their length of stay has been and whether any babies have been born there. If he cannot give those figures this evening, rather than simply saying “very few”, which was the phrase he used a few minutes ago, perhaps he will agree to write to noble Lords and let us know exactly what the numbers are.

[Lord Keen of Elie]

I am perfectly happy to write to noble Lords to give the figures for the number of pregnant women at present in detention and perhaps over a period of six months to cover both before and after Stephen Shaw’s report, so that there are some meaningful figures they can work from. I cannot give exact figures. That may not surprise your Lordships. I am advised that there are very few pregnant women in the estate. However, more precise figures will be given.

The adults at risk policy will take a more holistic and dynamic approach to the assessment of vulnerability, based on the best available evidence. That is what Stephen Shaw has identified as the most ambitious approach to ensuring that adults at risk are safeguarded. However, the approach in the proposed new clause would not be workable in practice. It does not take into account the realities of how individuals are discovered. For example, how would we handle cases at the border who can be returned on the next flight? Following this amendment, an individual could not be lawfully detained without an order of the tribunal. That would be an administrative challenge to obtain and would require significant extra resources. The same would be true of an individual encountered jumping off the back of a lorry. And what would happen if someone was already detained and raised these issues? Would they be unlawfully detained until an order of the tribunal was given? It is simply not workable in practice.

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[Baroness Hamwee]

I am not quite sure how that fits in with what I was saying. I am certainly not arguing that there should not be a good returns process; in fact, I have tabled an amendment to that effect later in the Bill.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

If the noble Baroness will allow me, one thing that does not seem to have been referred to in the course of our debates is the exponential increase in the number of people detained. I think that there was an 11% increase last year, with around 31,000 people being detained in this country. Does that not underline the importance of what she is saying about looking for alternatives to this? I gave the figures earlier: the cost to the public purse is around £36,000 per person detained. Millions of pounds are being spent on something that does not give great credit to our nation. Surely we should look for an alternative to this. We know that such alternatives exist elsewhere, which is where Stephen Shaw seems to be pointing us. Is that not what we should be doing between now and Report?

[Baroness Hamwee]

Indeed, and the sentence before the one which I quoted referred to a system,

“both … more protective of the welfare of vulnerable people and”,

delivering,

“better value for the taxpayer”.

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[Lord Keen of Elie]

I am obliged to the noble Baroness. Just to be clear, if I were to take the black letter of her amendment, I, like many of your Lordships, would be a little confused. Indeed, one part of the amendment appeared to remove the affirmative procedure of Parliament in approving the addition or removal of names from the safe list. I have no doubt that that was never her intention. I will therefore respond in the spirit in which the amendment was addressed.

There are various lists, of course; one has to be careful about this, because there are lists of countries for the purposes of Section 94, but in addition there are potential lists of safe third-party countries—that is, where someone has left one country but arrived in a safe country within Europe and then moved on to the United Kingdom. I will therefore deal with this at a fairly high level of generality, because the various lists have various different aspects to them. Indeed, the Part 3 list does not have any countries in it at the moment.

The Government have already made an announcement that they will not opt into the common EU list—just to be clear about that. However, in so far as we maintain lists of safe countries, we are conscious of the issues that can arise with respect to them. Indeed, it has been the subject of litigation in case law in this country, which cited, for example, Jamaica and the issue of whether it was a safe country of return. The Home Office keeps these lists, whether they are under the Immigration Act or under Part 3, under constant review, and consider all aspects of the list when deciding whether or not to maintain a country on that list or to remove it. I apologise for addressing the matter at that level of generality, but I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me for responding to her amendment in that form.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

I would be grateful if I could ask him something about these lists—whether the Government accept that the guidance the Home Office gives can sometimes have extraordinary consequences. He will know that his noble friend Lord Bates was good enough to meet me to discuss the situation of detainees held in detention centres in the Far East—people who had escaped from Pakistan. These included people from the Ahmadiyya community, Shia Muslims, Hindus, Christians—they came from many backgrounds but all had faced what seemed to be absolute examples of persecution. However, the Home Office guidance simply said that these were people who risked discrimination. As the noble Lord, Lord Bates, knows, that became like holy writ as far as the UNHCR—which I met during the same visit, in September last year—was concerned. I had the Home Office guidance quoted back at me as though this was a trump card they were able to use to show that these people were perfectly safe and no consequences would befall them. However, in reality, because of that guidance many of those cases will not even be considered until 2020, and those people will go on living beneath the radar between now and then, living illegally in the country where they are because their asylum claims have not been settled and they are not allowed to work. Therefore the implications of Home Office lists and guidance can often be more far-reaching than maybe we ever imagine.