Immigration Detention: Victims of Modern Slavery

Diane Abbott Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab) (Urgent Question)]

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement on immigration detention and victims of modern slavery.

[The Minister for Immigration (Caroline Nokes)]

Modern slavery is an abhorrent crime, and the Government are determined to stamp it out. In my role as Immigration Minister, I am especially aware of the shocking exploitation of vulnerable individuals from overseas who are duped by the promise of a better life in the UK, only to be trafficked and sold into modern slavery. Identifying and protecting victims of such crimes is a priority. In October 2017, we announced an ambitious package of reforms to the national referral mechanism. As well as improving the support on offer, these reforms are intended to provide quicker and more certain decision making, in which victims can have confidence.

I must make it clear, however, that being recognised as a victim of modern slavery does not automatically result in being granted immigration status in the UK. There may be victims of modern slavery who have no lawful basis to remain and for whom support is available to leave the UK voluntarily. It is important that we recognise the important role of our immigration policies. Although we are committed to supporting individuals to leave voluntarily, including with reintegration support, there may be occasions when they have exhausted all options and are refusing to leave, and we are faced with the difficult decision of detaining people to secure their return.

I want to reassure the House that we do not take these decisions lightly, but it may be necessary to detain individuals, even if they are vulnerable, to effect their removal. When that is the case, we seek to keep the period of detention as short as possible and place their welfare and safeguarding at the heart of what we do. The Home Secretary made clear his commitment to going further and faster with reforms to immigration detention, including by reducing the number of people we detain, increasing the number of voluntary returns and working with partners on alternatives to detention. We have made real progress in delivering these commitments. A number of women who would otherwise have been detained are now being managed in the community. Other pilots will begin later this year.

As we approach the first anniversary of Stephen Shaw’s second independent review of immigration detention, it is important to take stock of how far we have come, while acknowledging that there is much more to do to ensure that our approach to immigration detention is fair and humane.

[Ms Abbott]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question. On 19 June this year, the Immigration Minister provided a written answer on the possible immigration detention of persons who are in fact victims of slavery. The written answer read as follows:

“there is no central record”

of such persons, and

“The Home Office therefore does not collate or publish the data requested”.

However, we now learn from a freedom of information request by The Independent that that is not the case: 500 victims of enslavement or trafficking were held in immigration detention. I have myself visited Yarl’s Wood detention centre and met such persons.

In response to an earlier written question on 20 December last year, the Immigration Minister said:

“in cases in which it has been found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that an individual may be a victim of trafficking or modern slavery, the appropriateness of their being detained, or of their detention continuing, is governed by the Home Office’s modern slavery policy. This means that such individuals will not be detained”.

How many people who are victims of trafficking or modern slavery have been held in previous years? How many such people are currently held? Are the Government not in breach of their own stated policy on detention? How many of the 400 detainees were assessed as being a threat to public order and on what grounds? Does the Minister accept that when she responded to the written question saying that no data was available, she was in fact misleading the House?

[Caroline Nokes]

I reassure the right hon. Lady that I certainly was not misleading the House: there is no central record of those who have received a positive, conclusive grounds decision and are detained under immigration powers. While that information may be obtainable from the live Home Office case information database, otherwise referred to as CID, the information would be for internal management only. For example, some data may be incomplete and freedom of information requests are heavily caveated as such.

Releases of data from CID are always caveated and sometimes it is possible the data is not always accurate; there may be instances where individuals are counted twice. It is standard practice in parliamentary questions that we do not provide information that does not form part of published statistics. CID will show only those individuals who have been referred into the NRM from immigration teams and would not cover those referred to the NRM from other first responders, such as the police, social services or, potentially, medical practitioners.

The right hon. Lady asks specifically about the 507 individuals referred to in the After Exploitation report. I want to be very clear on this point: those were not 507 individuals detained after getting a positive reasonable grounds. As stated very clearly in the freedom of information response, the figure relates to people who had a positive reasonable grounds when entering detention or while in detention.

Further analysis of the figures shows that, of the 507 people in question, 479 received the positive reasonable grounds decision during a detention period—and of those, 328, or 68%, were released within two days of the decision and in total 422 were released within a week. Of the 57 detained for eight days or more following a positive reasonable grounds decision, 81% were foreign national offenders.