Immigration: Detention

Lord Lloyd of Berwick Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the Report of the Inquiry into the Use of Immigration Detention in the United Kingdom, published on 3 March.

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick (CB) (Valedictory Speech)]

My Lords, I will speak first to the subject matter of the debate since I was a member of the group which produced this report.

The basic legal principle is not in doubt: executive detention is lawful if, but only if, there is a realistic prospect of removing the detainee within a reasonable time. When we debated the Immigration Act this time last year, my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby, who I am more than glad to see in her place, moved an amendment which would have limited the period to 60 days. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, resisted the amendment on the ground that the principle is well established, with which, of course, I wholly agree.

However, the noble Lord went on to argue that the application of that principle should and could be left safely in the hands of the judges. I would normally welcome that argument with open arms but in this particular instance I am afraid to say that the judges have let us down. For example, in one case, an offender was detained pending his deportation to Somalia. He was eventually released but only after he had been detained for three years and five months. On no possible view could that be regarded as reasonable, yet his claim failed. I refer to some of these cases at page 18 of the report.

We are the only country in Europe which allows indefinite detention of this kind. In France, the maximum period is 45 days. In Spain, it is two months and in Italy it is three months, so we are way out of line with these countries. In the end, the group came to the view that we should have a maximum limit of 28 days. In coming to that view, we were much influenced by the corrosive effect which prolonged uncertainty has on the detainees themselves. There was much evidence to that effect, both from the detainees and the experts. I therefore hope that we will be hearing from others taking part in the debate about the reasons why we took that view.

Meanwhile, I must turn to my so-called valedictory speech, which I prefer to call my swan-song. I have been incredibly lucky to have what amounts to a second career in this House after I retired as a Law Lord in 1999. I have made many, many friends among Members and the staff. I particularly thank those members of staff to whom I come most frequently—namely, those in the Public Bill Office and the Printed Paper Office. I am sure that they will know to whom I am referring. I regard them as great friends and will miss them very greatly.

However, the fact is that I shall be 86 in May and feel that it is time to go, if only because I am beginning, I have to say, to feel my age. Not only that but I am also afraid that my age is beginning to show. I know that because whenever I get on to an underground train, if it is at all crowded, I find that men and women of all ages offer me their seats. That would be a good test for us all to apply.

When we were all much younger, there was a very popular musical called, “Salad Days”, which I hope some of your Lordships will remember. In it there was a rather sentimental song. Unless your Lordships insist, I will not sing it, but the refrain was:

“I’ll remind you to remind me we said we wouldn’t look back”.

When the time comes, one does look back, of course. It is the natural thing to do, and that is what I propose to do, with your Lordships’ consent.

I made my maiden speech in 1993 but did not, as the police say, come to notice until 2005. I was strongly opposed to the abolition of the Lord Chancellor. Your Lordships will remember how it happened. The Lord Chancellor was abolished by a fait accompli in a press release from 10 Downing Street. But at the end of the Second Reading, I moved an amendment—it has to be said, with the encouragement of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde—to refer the Bill to a Select Committee, which then happened. It was, of course, very soon discovered that the Lord Chancellor simply could not be abolished. He is far too deeply embedded in our history and constitution. Instead, the title of the Bill was changed and the Lord Chancellor was to be modified. That was a piece of luck because it enabled me to argue that the modified Lord Chancellor should continue to be a Member of this House and have some experience of the law. Those amendments were carried easily in this House but, unfortunately, late one night, they were defeated on ping-pong—and so we are now where we are.

My next appearance was as chairman of the Select Committee on the Speakership of the House of Lords. We were lucky to have as our clerk an up-and-coming young man who is now the Clerk of the Parliaments. He kept us straight as to the meaning of self-regulation, and I owe him a lot. We started our discussions a long way apart but, as often happens in these cases—indeed, as I pointed out during my speech—we slowly inched closer together. That is what we did, and we produced a report that I think one can say has stood the test of time.

I have already mentioned new friends that I have made while I have been a Member of the House. There is one friend in particular whom I would like to mention. He was one of the most remarkable men that I have ever known. His name was Lord Morris of Manchester, better known as Alf.

Our friendship came about in this way: I had presided in this House in a case which concerned the meaning of the noble Lord’s great pioneering Act, the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970. I called that Act a “noble aspiration”. When Lord Morris made his maiden speech in this House, he quoted those words. I was listening as he did so, so one thing led to another and we became friends.

At that time, Lord Morris was much concerned with the fate of returning veterans from the first Iraq war, suffering, as we all now know, from Gulf War syndrome. The Government had refused to hold an independent inquiry, so he did the unusual thing of holding his own independent inquiry of which he asked me to be the chairman, which I said I would.

We listened to a great deal of evidence, including from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, whom I am also glad to see sitting in his seat, and from the veterans and all sorts of experts. We were not at that time able to identify the cause of Gulf War syndrome, but we at least established that it existed, which the Government had up till then refused to acknowledge. We also pointed out that the veterans had been very badly treated. For that, we also secured for them an apology, but that was all.

I come to terrorism, with which I shall deal briefly because it is controversial. This has been my subject for 20 years. As it is controversial, I will provide just a few facts, which I know your Lordships know. Currently, there are 2.5 million Muslims in this country who are as loyal and law-abiding as we are, but there are some 100,000 Muslims who are inclined to a greater or lesser extent towards the terrorist cause. Our task, as I see it, is to win them over and keep them to our way of life and our way of thinking. This will take a very long time, probably a generation, as was the case with Irish terrorism. In the mean time, whatever we do, we must not alienate those 100,000 Muslims. We must try to keep them on our side.

And so I come to my last stopping-off point—just in time—which brings me back very close to where we started. I refer to the prisoners who are currently serving indeterminate sentences for the protection of the public. I have often given your Lordships the facts, but I will do so for one last time. There are currently 5,000 prisoners serving IPP sentences, a form of sentence which was abolished in 2012. I am concerned with only 650 of them, who are serving tariffs of less than two years which they were given more than eight years ago. About a third of them have been assessed as being unlikely to reoffend. Of the 650, eight were sentenced to a tariff of less than three months; 22 to less than six months; 27 to less than nine months; yet they are all still in prison.

Mr Grayling was given a power in 2012 to change the release test for those prisoners so as to secure their early release, but he has declined to exercise that power. I have received many letters from those prisoners because they know that I am their champion and I have met members of their families. They have no means of knowing, even now, when, if ever, they will be released.

If I were allowed one last wish at the end of my swan-song, it would be that all seven of the political parties should enter into manifesto commitments that will meet those people’s needs as soon as the new Government are elected. They should do so if only on the grounds that it will save £40 million a year, but I hope that they would do so on grounds of simple humanity. These prisoners have suffered a grave injustice, and it is high time that we came to their rescue.