Immigration Bill

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I support this run of amendments. I do so not with a lot of expertise but with real puzzlement. I hope that the Minister can deal with one or two of my puzzles relating to the cost, effectiveness and impact of the current policy and the possible risks there might be should it ever be changed. Does the Minister have a ready list of other policies that cost £160 million a year and produce no measurable benefits what ever to anybody? If he has, I recommend that he talks to the Chancellor about how that might be used effectively elsewhere by the Government.

The percentage of people who are detained and who subsequently return is not that high. Does the Minister have the figures for the returns percentage of those who are not detained? I strongly suspect that detaining people is no more successful in encouraging them not to return than not detaining them. However, the Minister may have some evidence that would contradict my impression, and I think we should hear it.

There are two impacts that I would like to hear some evidence from the Minister about. One of those is the impact on the United Kingdom’s reputation for the rule of the law—the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, made the point just a few minutes ago—our reputation for fairness and our reputation for pragmatic common sense. We rather pride ourselves on our pragmatism and common sense when it comes to public administration. Does the Minister have any evidence that those countries that have a set time limit find that that leads to them having fewer returners than we do? What evidence is there that our asylum seekers—those who reach our shores—are more dangerous than those who get to France, Spain or Italy? Are they more likely to abscond than the people who go to those countries? In terms of the importance of having this policy at all, are we more successful in getting returners by not having that time limit than those countries are by having one? If that is a central part of the justification for the current policy, I am sure that the Minister will have those figures at his fingertips.

Then there is the impact on detainees themselves. The mental health impact and the impact on pregnant women have been mentioned. Bearing in mind that two-thirds of these people will be let out into the community eventually, the mental health costs and the costs for the children will fall on the National Health Service. What assessment have the Government made of the additional National Health Service costs generated by the impact of returning detainees to the community, with all the problems so ably set out in the Shaw report? I notice from an earlier debate that when it came to reporting complaints about treatment by immigration officers, the Government pointed out that there were five different routes to register a complaint. Obviously, if you do not speak English and have no experience of democratic public institutions and how they might be able to help you, those are formidable barriers to taking advantage of that help. So far as I understood from the puzzled looks around this Chamber, none of us knew how the process worked, never mind someone detained in Yarl’s Wood. What information is put in the way of detainees about how they can claim the rights that the Minister sets out as being available?

My final question is the same as the one I started with. What purpose does it serve to have the current policy, which costs public money, is not effective and has such a negative impact on the UK’s reputation abroad and on detainees themselves? I hope that the various amendments in front of the Committee today will provide some opportunities for the Minister to take back to the ministerial team a clear view that something has to change—to save money, to save the reputation of the United Kingdom and to save detainees the indignities that we are inflicting on them.

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I find myself once again in a minority of one in the Committee, but I am reassured that I am not in such a minority in the country as a whole.

The Bill and these amendments should be considered in a wider context. The removal of immigration offenders is central to the credibility of any immigration system. Furthermore, detention is an essential component of the removal process. Of course it is undesirable for people to spend long periods of time in detention, but in practice that is not the outcome of a majority of cases. The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, mentioned some statistics, but there are others from the same year, 2014. About 30,000 people were detained in that year, but 63% were detained for less than 28 days, of whom 37% were detained for less than seven days. Only 11% of those detained spent more than three months in detention and, of those, 62% were eventually removed from the UK, which suggests that those cases were among the more difficult ones and that detention was necessary to achieve removal.

Individual cases vary enormously. I do not think anyone would favour pregnant women being held in detention, but any specific time limit would be an invitation to those concerned and their lawyers to game the system. Let us not forget that 50% of all those who claim asylum in this country are in fact refused, and that includes those who have made an appeal and have lost it. That is the average over the past 10 years, so broadly speaking we are talking about a significant number of people who the immigration courts have decided no longer have the right to be in this country. Those are the people we are talking about here.

Those who attended the Second Reading debate will have heard the most eloquent intervention by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, in which he stressed the complexities of the issues and the fact that detention is permitted only where there is a reasonable prospect of removal. That is the case law and he set it out clearly, and it seems to me a reasonable approach to this issue.

There are of course other entirely different approaches to reducing the time spent in detention. One example is to have effective returns agreements with third countries and to combine those with dedicated resources for enforcement so that the entire process speeds up. Meanwhile, any significant reduction in the use or indeed the prospect of detention could only encourage people to stay on illegally in the hope, and even the expectation, that they could dodge removal. Finally, we cannot be blind to the extraordinary events that are taking place in southern Europe. This is surely not the time to weaken our capability to return economic migrants to their countries of origin.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, given that my noble friend has placed a great deal of reliance on public opinion and how he thinks public policy should be shaped, and given that he has cited figures from 2014, has he had a chance to reflect on the figures produced by the House of Commons Library about the cost of running detention centres in the way we are at the moment? The cost was £164 million in 2014, while the cost of keeping one person in a detention centre is £36,000 a year. In addition, £15 million was paid out in compensation for illegal and unlawful detention. Surely he would agree with those of us who have been putting an alternative point of view that it is an issue which needs to be tackled at a fundamental level.

[Lord Green of Deddington]

Yes, I certainly agree that detention is a very expensive business in all circumstances; that is true. The people I would be most concerned about are those who plan to come here as economic migrants and who would have no right of asylum. They are the people who need to be deterred. It is not so much public opinion; it is having an asylum system which is seen to be effective. By all means, people who have been tortured need to be dealt with, but it would surprise me if many were actually in detention. They would not be there if their cases had not been heard and refused by the immigration courts.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I am not sure whether the noble Lord has read the report of the inquiry to which a number of us contributed, but we did quote from the International Detention Coalition about the experience in countries that do not rely so much on detention. The noble Lord seems to be worried about what that might mean in terms of the effect on compliance. The coalition found that alternatives to detention,

“maintain high rates of compliance and appearance, on average 90% compliance. A study collating evidence from 13 programs found compliance rates ranged between 80% and 99.9%. For instance, Hong Kong achieves a 97% compliance rate with asylum seekers or torture claimants in the community, and in Belgium, a pilot working with families facing removal had an 82% compliance rate”.

Alternatives to detention have proved to be very effective and can address some of the concerns of the noble Lord.

[Lord Green of Deddington]

Yes indeed, but I would imagine that the conditions are very different in Hong Kong and to a certain extent in Belgium. You have to look at the circumstances that you find in a particular country. What we have here is a very large illegal population which people can quite easily join. I am not against looking at the kind of alternatives being suggested, but let us be pretty sure that they are going to be just as effective. Any move at this point to weaken, not so much the asylum system but our capability to remove those who have failed asylum, would be an extremely foolish step to take.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, this may be the last intervention, before the noble Lord sits down—again, using the language of this place. He has based his comments on immigration offenders. I wonder if he could explain what he means by that term. Certainly there are individuals who have committed offences within our criminal justice system and who are—not on the way to being deported; that being the problem—liable to deportation. There are people who have sought asylum but who are not offenders in the way that I would understand the term. Indeed, their claims have not been determined, which as we have heard in other debates, is a big problem. Could he just disaggregate that term?

[Lord Green of Deddington]

The noble Baroness’s point is rather similar to the point she made about bail earlier in the debate. The term “immigration offenders” is a broad term and applies to anyone who does not have, or no longer has, a legal right to be in the UK. It could be a whole range of people who do not have a right to be here; they have not taken opportunities for a voluntary return, or even an assisted voluntary return, both of which are available to them. Therefore, they might find themselves in detention for those reasons.

[Baroness Hamwee]

Does that include those who have sought asylum but whose claim has not been determined?

[Lord Green of Deddington]

Not when I use the term, and I do not think that it applies to those people. It applies to those whose cases have been rejected, and rejected on appeal, and they do not return home when they could do so.

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie)]

I wonder whether I might, as it were, intervene at this point. I was obliged for the contributions from all corners of the House about what is a difficult and demanding issue. Having regard to the observations of the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, I notice that the immigration system with which he is struggling is a product, at least to a material degree, of the Immigration Act 2014, which is in turn the product of a coalition Government, in which I believe he was a Minister. That said, clearly there is room for improvement. On that we can agree, and that is why the Bill is before the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, before the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, responds, the picture that has been painted of the situation, including those who are subject to detention, does not seem to accord with the observations which so many of us have heard, including those of Stephen Shaw. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, quoted the last sentence of Mr Shaw’s conclusions, which is in paragraph 11.8. He said:

“Immigration detention has increased, is increasing, and—whether by better screening, more effective reviews, or formal time limit—it ought to be reduced”.

It seems unlikely to me that it has been increasing because the number of people who have been convicted of offences and are due for deportation, but for some reason or another are not being deported, would account for that increase in the way in which I heard the explanation.

I took seriously the comments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton under Heywood. I ask again whether there is not a way in which those of us who are concerned properly to get to a situation where there is not the lack of hope to which noble Lords have referred cannot together find, with some imagination, a way of dealing with this that will give a structure to detention immigration but allow for the very rare exceptions that it might be proper to make.

[Lord Green of Deddington]

May I give one example of how this arises? There are some countries that require an interview with their consul in London to re-document someone who is here as an illegal immigrant and in detention. That requires an interview to which the person in detention has to agree. If there is a time limit of a month, he will know perfectly well that all that he has to do is to refuse the interview for a few weeks and he will be out.

[Baroness Hamwee]

I am not quite sure how that fits in with what I was saying. I am certainly not arguing that there should not be a good returns process; in fact, I have tabled an amendment to that effect later in the Bill.