Immigration: Detention

Lord Hope of Craighead Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, it is a tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, that so many excellent speeches have been given in his honour today. I first met him when I was appointed to the House as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. We sat together in the Appellate Committee over many years in many distinct cases. The case that comes to my mind as demonstrating the essential humanity of the man whose departure we regret so much is an intellectual property case about the design of teddy bears. I do not know whether he remembers the case, but along to us was brought one of these teddy bears so that we could see the exhibit and understand what the case was all about. At the end, moving rapidly, as he often does, with the assistance of a doorkeeper the noble and learned Lord was able to seize hold of that teddy bear and take it into his possession. I hope very much that he still has it with him and that it will be a companion to him in his retirement.

I am very much in sympathy with the main thrust of this report and welcome many of the points that it makes. That is for a particular reason: it was my practice when I was the Lord Justice General in Scotland to visit as many of the prisons and detention institutions in Scotland as I could, because I felt that I had to know about the conditions there to do my job as Lord Justice General. During the seven years that I held office, I managed to visit all but one of the institutions and one or two of these visits stand particularly in my memory.

One of them was about 20 years ago to a block in a prison in Greenock, if my memory serves me correctly, where a large number of asylum seekers were being held in detention in the Scottish immigration detention centre, pending decisions as to whether they were to be deported or released. I remember being struck by two things. The first was the wholly inappropriate conditions in which these unfortunate people were being held. They can best be described as mid-Victorian, with the most primitive of cells and the most basic of facilities. The second was how totally abandoned these individuals appeared to be. I can still see in my mind’s eye the group of people to whom I was introduced. They were just standing about in a corridor like lost souls. There was nothing for them to do. Unlike convicted prisoners, who, as the noble and learned Lord will know well, can be given work to do and whose time will be occupied with education, work or something like that, there was nothing that could be done with them. They were simply there. There was nowhere to go and nowhere to sit down except in their own cells. Few of them could speak English. They seemed to have no idea why they were there and certainly no idea how long they were going to be there. They put questions to me and to the prison officers who were with me that we simply could not answer. I found it deeply depressing and it has remained in my memory ever since, which is why I am so much in sympathy with the work that the committee did and the points that have been made.

Things have moved on a little bit, at least in Scotland, because people who are being held under these arrangements now are being detained somewhere else, in Dungavel, which is mentioned in the report. It is much better suited to the purpose. When I did my travels around these places, it was an open prison. At one time, it was the home of one of Scotland’s most distinguished families—indeed, a Member of your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk of Douglas, is said to have been born there, I think because it was the family home. Of course, it lost some of its original charm when it was turned into an open prison, but at least it had a rural setting and the kind of breadth to it that meant that it felt quite unlike a prison. That at least is some advance. It is a less intimidating place and there are many places where people can move around and sit down and live more or less like normal people. I have not seen the regime since then and I do not know how matters are being handled there, but I was saddened to see on page 47 of the report the problem, which affected people at Dungavel, of people being moved about “like furniture” without concern for their individual position.

There is not time to go into the issue about timing, except to say that the challenge that this report has set for the Minister and the Government means that the way to deal with it has to be by a radical rethinking of the whole idea of the use of detention from the very beginning. We should not put people into detention until it becomes really necessary to do so. The tragedy is that people are put there like furniture, as was said in the report, and once they are there it is extremely difficult to get them out, for the reasons that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, mentioned. There is real value in the report and I greatly welcome it.