Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Prashar Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 8th September 2025 Lords Chamber

From both a rule of law perspective and a practical perspective, the present position is untenable. The Government need to respond urgently. I beg to move.

[Baroness Prashar (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, to which I am a signatory. It has been admirably moved by the noble Lord, Lord Bach. He has set out in detail the rationale for the amendment, so I will not repeat his arguments. However, I would like to highlight the human impact of lack of legal aid for those in immigration detention.

Look at the scenario. Those in detention may have faced trauma such as persecution, threats to life and inhumane treatment by callous human traffickers. Following this trauma, they face a very complicated, confusing and bureaucratic system which they have to navigate. It is, in fact, extremely difficult to navigate the system without competent legal advice, and if they get anything wrong, the consequences are very detrimental to them, as this can endanger their safety in the long term.

Concerns have been expressed by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons about the detained duty service, which all the evidence shows is not easily accessible and is of doubtful quality. It gives only 30 minutes of advice, which is not enough to explain the circumstances. Furthermore, at the end of the 30 minutes, it is not clear whether they will be supported. If appeal deadlines are missed, and because of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, this lateness is held as evidence of lack of credibility. All this is happening when those detained are locked up in prison-like conditions, potentially indefinitely.

This scenario is not exceptional; all the evidence shows that it is quite common. In short, the system of providing legal assistance and representation in detention is broken. Action is urgently needed—not least for the reasons described by the noble Lord, Lord Bach—such as the piloting of the UK-France migration deal. We need practical action to improve access to high-quality legal advice within 48 hours. This will not only be humane, but, as has been described, will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the immigration and asylum system. I therefore commend this amendment to the Committee.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I too have put my name to this amendment, and I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for how he opened the debate and explained the amendment.

About 42 years ago, my first task in the other place was to be a member of the Standing Committee on the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill, which was probably the most important criminal law statute enacted in my time in either House of Parliament. Paragraph 6 of the Home Office’s online summary of the Act’s provisions, which is shared with the Legal Aid Agency and the Law Society website, says:

“The police must tell you … why you have been arrested and are being detained”.


There is an analogy between what we are discussing today and what happens in cases where people are arrested in accordance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Those of us who have been MPs or have worked with the police—I was once the chair of the London Policing Ethics Panel—and spent the night with police officers on duty have seen the following happen in real time in the real world. If somebody is taken into a police station under arrest, they wait to be interviewed and then a duty solicitor is found for them if they do not have a solicitor of their own. The job of that duty solicitor is to explain to them—in terms they understand, and, I hope, in a language they understand—why they have been detained.

People who are arrested for criminal offences in the ordinary course of things on a noisy Saturday night in north London do not expect to be kept in custody for a very long time. If somebody is detained under immigration detention, it must be even more alarming, because the consequences they see panning out before them are being put by force on to an airplane and returned to a country they have not been to for a very long time. It may be a very deserved return, but it must still be alarming.

For the kind of police situation I have described, it is worth looking at the statistics. Some 25% of those arrested—one in four—are not charged with any offence whatever. Mistakes are made and, sometimes, they are glaring mistakes: the wrong person is arrested, either due to mistaken identity or because they happen to be a youngster carrying the identity card of somebody who may look rather like them but is a bit older. They may be arrested mistakenly because their age has been misunderstood. There may just be a terrible mistake, which can be ironed out only if somebody is there to help them, because complete misunderstandings occur. It is very important in all cases that there should be an early intervention, which may be very brief, in which a lawyer can be made available to advise a person whether what has happened to them is legitimate—not whether it is right; that is not the question—as part of the process.

For the sort of immigration detention we are discussing, it may be that the figure of mistakes is much lower than 25%—I accept that. However, I do not accept for one moment that there will be no mistakes. Indeed, the provision of legal aid is a key component in upholding the constitutional right of access to the courts, which is itself inherent in the rule of law. The courts have repeatedly upheld the principle that a failure to provide legal aid in what are regarded proportionately as proper circumstances can amount to a breach of fundamental rights. I cite, for example, the judgment of Lord Reed in the UK Supreme Court case, R (on the application of UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017], at page 51, paragraph 66. It is an undeniable right.

I congratulate the Government on some steps that they are taking to deal with immigration cases. They are speeding up the process dramatically. I hope that those cases—for example, the Afghan and Hong Kong cases—in which almost everybody is given asylum anyway will be speeded up so that they can be dealt with more or less summarily. I hope that the Government will fulfil their promise to appoint more adjudicators, judges of one kind or another, for as long as is needed to deal with the backlog. I hope they will use these adjudicators in a creative way by sending them out to where the people they are adjudicating on are situated, so that cases can be dealt with in bulk, possibly by hiring a local school or village hall or by simply setting up a room wherever those people are held, so that the cases can be dealt with quickly.