Immigration Bill

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 84 and 85, and comment on government Amendment 86. Since I proposed to the Minister in Committee that the Bill should be temporarily withdrawn so that it could be redrafted to reflect the Government’s countless changes of mind during its passage and the recommendations of the reports and review they had commissioned, a further 59 government amendments have been added to the 250 that I mentioned at that time, and what was Clause 34 only three weeks ago is now Clause 59 in what has become a monster. I beg the Minister and his colleagues to consider their poor front-line officials, who have to interpret and administer this mass of micromanagement, on top of all the other legislation that is being introduced, and ask themselves whether they would like to be in their position.

Looking through the proceedings of the cross-party committee on immigration detention, of which I and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Lister of Burtersett, were members, and the evidence given that influenced our recommendation that it should be subject to a 28-day limit, I well remember my noble and learned friend Lord Lloyd of Berwick—sadly now retired from the House—pointing out that such detention was administrative, not legal, since it was imposed by Home Office officials and not in a court of law. In addition, the United Kingdom was an outlier, both within the European Union and elsewhere, in not having a limit on the length of time that a potential immigrant could be detained. It was also pointed out to us that there was no correlation between the length of detention and the likelihood of the Government being able to effect removal. Indeed, the opposite was true. Our recommendation was endorsed by the House of Commons in a detailed debate on our report of 10 September 2015.

Passionate cross-party opposition to limitless detention was displayed at all stages of the passage of the Bill through the other place. Indeed, the shadow Immigration Minister, Sir Keir Starmer MP, quoting the all-party report, said that,

“the United Kingdom has a proud tradition of upholding justice and the right to liberty. However, the continued use of indefinite detention puts this proud tradition at risk”.—[Official Report, Commons, 1/12/15; col. 186.]

However, all attempts to pass an amendment failed, thanks to the Committee system in the other place, which has a built-in government majority of nine to seven in a Committee of 16. I therefore tabled my amendment in the spirit of trying to restore some national pride.

As far as Amendment 84 is concerned, I thank the Minister for, and refer him to, his 11-page letter of 1 March to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, which he copied to others, and his two-pager to me of 11 March. In the former, he states that individuals can challenge Home Office decisions by way of judicial review, and that legal advice is available to those contained in immigration removal centres. That is rather like the Home Office’s invariable assurance that although conditions in immigration centres may have been as bad as those reported by inspectors, all is now sweetness and light—until disproved at the next inspection. Whatever is wishfully thought by officials simply is not so in practice.

Of course, detainees can in theory challenge Home Office decisions, but new arrivals must wait for a week before they are allowed to apply for bail, and concerns have frequently been expressed about failures of centre staff adequately to explain the existence of and procedure for accessing the necessary procedures to detainees. In recent years, the Home Office has repeatedly been found to have unlawfully detained individuals for protracted periods. For example, in 2014, the High Court found the 11-month detention of a Zimbabwean woman seeking to join her husband in the United Kingdom under refugee family reunion rules to be in violation of both Articles 3 and 5 of the Human Rights Act. Between 2011 and 2014, £15 million was paid out in compensation for unlawful detention.

While on the subject of the Home Office, I repeat to the Minister what I have said many times before. The culture of disbelief that pervades the Home Office, allied to the appalling standard of its casework over the years—witnessed by the staggeringly high number of successful appeals against its decisions—and the appalling quality of its communication with applicants, gives me no confidence that it is capable of carrying out what the Government apparently wish. Nothing has been done to improve the situation for years.

The Minister now tells us—again in his letter of 1 March—that the Government propose to implement new approaches to case management and, by the summer, to appoint a separate gatekeeper team which will approve decisions about who enters immigration detention, scrutinise prospects and speed of removal and assess vulnerability. Furthermore, by the autumn, a new team will build greater expertise on making detention decisions and ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place so that, by the end of the year, caseworkers will focus on progression towards a person’s return and those detained will have both better access to information about their case and greater interaction with casework staff in immigration removal centres. Furthermore, after 14 years of inaction, the short-term holding facility rules are to be referred to an eight-week consultation.

Familiarity is said to breed contempt. I have to say to the House that, based on almost 20 years of familiarity with the current immigration system, I regard all that as largely a figment of Home Office imagination.

Amendment 84 is designed to ensure that there is legal oversight of the detention of anyone detained by administrative rather than legal process. I acknowledge the thoughts of my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood about whether 28 days is long enough and fears that the First-tier Tribunal might be swamped with appeals. I also understand his concern about new subsection (4) in the amendment, but if the Home Office is working as the Minister sets out in his 1 March letter, there should be little need to detain anyone for longer than 28 days. Should my amendment be agreed, such technical issues can be corrected by the Government at Third Reading.

Amendment 85 expands on the list of those considered to be vulnerable in the Minister’s letter of 1 March and those who qualify for the guidance that the Secretary of State is required to lay before Parliament under government Amendment 86. On this issue, a six-month study by the Helen Bamber Foundation carried out between 3 July last year and 3 January this year showed that, out of 371 people referred to it, 84% had significant indicators of vulnerability, including torture and human trafficking, that had been routinely ignored by the Home Office. I suggest that the fact that such an unacceptable rate of failure to identify vulnerability continues, despite the suspension of the detained fast-track process in July 2015, demonstrates that, in the Home Office-run system, the culture of disbelief that I mentioned earlier still overrides significant indicators.

This all adds up to my firm belief, arrived at after many salutary experiences over almost 20 years, that the way in which immigration detention is managed and conducted is in urgent need of improvement. Judging by the Minister’s letter, the Government seem to have reached that conclusion as well. The Bill should present an ideal opportunity for such improvement to be codified, and I suggest that that process should start with legal oversight of administratively awarded detention, but with my wider consideration in mind. I beg to move.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak only to Amendment 84, not Amendments 85 and 86, which concern the detention of vulnerable persons. Far and away the most striking feature of Amendment 84 is proposed new subsection (4), which would disapply the time limit in any case where the detainee has been sentenced to imprisonment for 12 months or more, or is someone whom it is proposed to deport. The fact is that those are the vast majority of cases involving prolonged detention. Frankly, that provision emasculates the whole idea of a time limit.

None of the previous campaigns or arguments in favour of a time limit has suggested such a striking restriction on its scope; no such suggestion was advanced in Committee; and no other country has gone down this road. Small wonder that in its briefing on the amendment, the Equality and Human Rights Commission does not support subsection (4); nor does the organisation Bail for Immigration Detainees, to which I spoke at some length on the telephone this morning. It says that, with this restriction, it would regard the amendment as essentially pointless.

I suggest that subsection (4) is inconsistent with the definition of “relevant powers” in subsection (6), because those powers as identified in paragraphs (b) and (d) refer to detention pending deportation powers: detention which, under subsection (4), would not be subject to the limit anyway. I therefore propose to address the amendment for all the world as if subsection (4) was not part of it. Let me make plain at this stage that, even then, I shall conclude by offering limited support for the imposition of a time limit—certainly less opposition than I have expressed hitherto.

At Second Reading, I spoke against the introduction of fixed time limits for immigration detention. I pointed to the very real difficulties of such limits in the case of those whom we are trying to remove, who exercise remarkable persistence and ingenuity in their efforts to remain here. As the Minister made plain in answer to a Question a fortnight ago arising from the Chief Inspector of Prisons’ report on the immigration removal centre at Harmondsworth, the overwhelming majority of the 2,700 detainees there have committed immigration offences, 40% being foreign national offenders. Those figures are higher still if you consider those detainees who have been there for more than four months—or, indeed, more than 28 days. They are, as the Minister said, working very hard to avoid their removal, and trying to frustrate the system.