UK Border Agency

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and congratulate him on obtaining this important and timely debate. In doing so, I salute his tireless and determined championing of the causes of those who seek sanctuary in this country following torture or ill treatment in their own country.

I want to concentrate on one aspect of the UKBA’s performance with which I am currently engaged: the enforced removal of those for whom entry has been denied. I declare three interests that will colour my contribution. First, as Chief Inspector of Prisons, I was given the responsibility of inspecting immigration detention centres. To my surprise—but not entirely surprising, given the number of Prison Service officers in the then Immigration and Nationality Directorate—I found that immigration detention rules were not based on UN and European Union detention rules but on UK prison rules, which are wholly inappropriate because immigration detainees and asylum seekers have not been convicted of crimes. My inspectors and I spent 18 months working with the IND, amending the rules to make them fit for purpose. My main concern was the lack of a coherent strategy, or any leadership or direction, in the immigration and asylum process.

My second interest was as an independent asylum commissioner, a commission that reported in 2009. As I had done with detention rules, we deliberately gave the UKBA the opportunity to comment on our findings before we published our recommendations. In commending the then Border and Immigration Agency for making strenuous efforts to deal with asylum claims more efficiently, we found what the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, has just described—the culture of disbelief that persisted among decision-makers. The adversarial nature of the asylum process and the lack of access to legal advice for applicants led to perverse and unjust decisions. My belief in the culture of disbelief was proved by the then Minister, Mr Byrne, the very afternoon that we published the report. He was asked on “World at One” about the remarks that I had made on the “Today” programme. He said, “I have not read the report but I disagree with every word of it”.

The year before, on behalf of Birnberg and Medical Justice, I had written the foreword to a report called Outsourcing Abuse, in which I said that if even one of the 48 detailed cases from a list of nearly 300 alleged assaults by security guards employed by private security companies on contract to the Home Office is substantiated,

“that amounts to something of a preventable national disgrace”.

In 2010, my noble friend Lady O’Loan in her report on the dossier on behalf of the Home Secretary found that although there had been no pattern of systematic abuse by escort officers, it clearly happened, and that there was no management or training of guards. She recommended a review of the training provided for the use of force, involving annual retraining to ensure that in any case in which force is used, officers are trained to consider constantly the legality, necessity and proportionality of that use of force.

This is where my third interest is: as chairman of an independent inquiry into forced removals on behalf of Citizens UK, the largest alliance of civil society organisations in the country, which works on many issues, not just immigration. I want to concentrate particularly on the case of Mr Jimmy Mubenga, who died on 12 October 2010 from cardio-respiratory collapse after being restrained by three G4S detainee custody officers in an aircraft at Heathrow while being removed to Angola.

Two days ago, Mr Gaon Hart of the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was,

“insufficient evidence to bring any charges for Mr Mubenga's death … Although counsel advised that there was a breach of duty in the way Mr Mubenga was held”.

However, it was not enough to tell a jury what may have caused a person’s death, and there was,

“insufficient evidence that the restraining methods used … were, in themselves, illegal”.

He added that,

“experts suggested there were shortcomings in the training given to the security guards”,

and that the training on positional asphyxia—where the position of an individual affects their ability to breathe adequately, causing death due to lack of oxygen—and the warning signs for identifying it, were both flawed.

Moreover, although G4S had followed training recommended by the UKBA and the National Offender Management Service, which had been found to be safe and fit for purpose after official review—an official review that incidentally was carried out by the National Offender Management Service on its own techniques—was criticised by experts, as was the lack of specific training for the use of restraint in aircraft. I understand that the CPS is writing to the UKBA, to NOMS and to G4S expressing these concerns; and I ask the Minister whether copies of these letters can be put in the Library.

I have to say that in the face of all the evidence that we have gathered during our inquiry, quite apart from all the other evidence that was available, I find that CPS decision, at kindest, perverse. Passengers reported hearing Mr Mubenga cry out that he could not breathe and that the guards were killing him. There had been Home Office warnings to G4S in 2006 about the dangers of using positional asphyxia. There had been stringent criticisms by the coroner in the case of Gareth Myatt, a 15 year-old who died in Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre following the use of similar procedures for restraint by G4S guards. He, too, had called out that he could not breathe before he died. As an inquest is the only public forum in which this death can now be scrutinised, I ask the Minister to confirm that this will be conducted as soon as possible by an experienced coroner, and that public funding will be made available to ensure full support for Mr Mubenga’s family.

The Home Affairs Select Committee in another place has also investigated rules governing enforced removals, although in nothing like the same depth as my inquiry. The Government’s response has not been as full as I would hope. It confirms that all guards must be certified by the Home Secretary, which includes certification that they have received training in restraint techniques approved by the National Offender Management Service. I believe that that is perverse.

Unfortunately, time does not allow me to cover all the points that I shall present to the Home Affairs Select Committee in the report in November because I want it to follow them up, but they include the recommendation that the regulation of all detainee escort officers by the security industry authority is in line with an amendment to the Private Security Industry Act 2001, which currently excludes them. This must include not just initial licensing but annual top-up training, connected to annual training on a physical intervention skill model. Frankly the current training of security guards is not effective. If the UKBA had bothered to look beyond the inappropriate NOMS techniques, it would have found that special mental hospitals have for years rejected them in favour of those that are non-pain compliant, except in extreme circumstances when removing a weapon. Unfortunately the three special hospitals have used slightly different techniques that have never been codified, and I have written to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, about this.

I asked the UKBA to attend our evidence session, and we heard from the restraint trainer at Ashworth Hospital, who told us that not only had he done what he had done with non-pain techniques, but that the Liverpool police had asked him to devise techniques for getting people on and off crowded Mersey ferries, and that he could do the same for aircraft. Last week, the Minister of Justice announced the introduction of new minimising and managing physical restraint, formerly known as control-restraint techniques, for use in juvenile custody, recommended by a restraint advisory board set up for the purpose. This has now been reconstituted as the Independent Restraint Advisory Panel.

I asked the Minister whether the panel could be charged with similarly examining restraint techniques for the UKBA, independent of NOMS. We found that the measurement of successful returns passed to Ministers is not a qualitative process but merely counts the number of reports received from contractors. The only training received by the eight monitors who report on a contractor’s performance and the conduct of individuals was to watch a session of contractor-run training. Far from recruiting and training staff when contracts change, old ones—no doubt bringing old habits with them—are merely TUPE-ed from one contract to another. The Immigration Service Commissioner is prevented from regulating unscrupulous alleged legal advisers who exploit immigrants, and so on.

We have found good things, such as the Independent Family Returns Panel, whose procedures we have recommended to the UKBA for single returnees as well, not least because the in-depth examination of the appropriateness of return might avoid scandals, such as reported by Freedom from Torture and others, of previously tortured people who, their case being disbelieved by the UKBA, were returned, tortured again, and escaped to seek asylum once more.

My successor as Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, coined the phrase “the virtual prison” to describe what Ministers were told by officials as opposed to what she saw on the ground. I fear that one of the most besetting sins of the UKBA, and indeed of the Home Office over the years, has been its continued refusal to listen to facts from outsiders. I just hope that Ministers will discard the former practice and listen, because it really does matter. The image of this country is presented by the UKBA, and currently too much of what we represent is being let down by procedures that, with good leadership, good management and good training, could be avoided.