Illegal Migration Bill

John McDonnell Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

The Prime Minister has called this Bill decent and humane. It is clearly neither. I therefore support Lords amendments 36C, 36D and 33B, which would restrict the detention of children.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I want to apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I do not think I indicated clearly enough that I wanted to speak. Thank you for your generous dexterity in finding time for me.

I want to say one simple thing about the assurances given so far on the detention of children: they are not sufficient. There are large numbers of children who will be detained. The definition of age-appropriate and child-appropriate accommodation is not clear enough.

I remind the House of my experience with Harmondsworth detention centre in my constituency before 2014, when we legislated to prevent children being detained in detention centres. That detention centre was also meant to be age and child-appropriate, but what happened? It simply had a wing with a school and so on, and children were locked up in there for months on end. We saw the reports of individual civil society organisations that assessed the mental health implications of the detention of children at that stage.

So far, the Minister has told me that there is no Government intention to detain children in detention centres again, but, as I said to him before, intention is not good enough. We need legislation to prevent that from happening again. My fear is that, under pressure, Government Ministers will decide that there will be some appropriate decoration of some sections of Harmondsworth and it will be opened up for children again.

I was a house father at a children’s home in Hillingdon. It was one of the traditional children’s homes, run effectively as a family unit. I pursued my own career, and my wife was the house mother in charge and I was the house father. It was like a large fostering unit, basically, and we took in children who had been detained in Harmondsworth. Even before it was of the prison style that it is now, those children were, I believe, scarred for life. I did not think that we would ever return to locking children up in that way. The children we looked after often came to us after they had been lost within the system while their cases were being processed over a long time. They were often separated from their families, who came through other routes. I think the damage was a scandal of this country’s treatment of human beings.

That was why, from 2010 until 2012, we ran a campaign—across all religious groups, and with civil society organisations such as the Children’s Society—and published report after report. David Cameron came forward heroically and said, “We will never detain children again,” and we legislated for that in 2014. We are now going back to detaining children almost indefinitely for some categories. We have not got the assurances that we need about where they will be detained or about the care, comfort and succour that they will have to support them. As a result, if we allow this legislation to go through, it will be a stain upon this House and upon society overall for a long time to come.

I ask Members to think again. We now go back into ping-pong with the other House, which is calling simply for a realistic time limit on the detention of children so that they are not damaged beyond repair in the way they were 10 years ago. I do not think that a simple amendment to set a time limit on children suffering in detention when they arrive in this country is an awful lot to ask of the Government. They often come from countries where they have suffered enough; we should not impose even more suffering on them.

[Robert Jenrick]

With the leave of the House, let me say a few words to close this short debate.

As I said at the outset, when we met and voted 18 times last week, we supported the Bill time and again. In each of those 18 votes, we in this democratically elected Chamber voted to stop the boats, secure our borders and enable this important Bill to move forward. Now is the time for the other place, which is, at its heart, as a number of colleagues have said—