Immigration Bill

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I declare a number of immigration interests. As Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons I was responsible for inspecting all places of immigration detention, during the course of which I found much wrong with the system, such as the use of inappropriate detention rules which, fortunately, I was able to correct. From 2007 to 2009 with my noble friends Lady Mar and Lord Sandwich I was a member of an independent asylum commission which submitted three reports to the then Government, containing detailed analysis of what was wrong with the asylum system and numerous recommendations for improvement.

In 2008, I forwarded a carefully researched dossier to the Home Secretary, entitled Outsourcing Abuse, which listed details of more than 70 cases of injury to failed asylum seekers undergoing enforced removal. In 2010, I was a member of a government advisory board on the use of child detention, whose recommendations I hope to see realised in this Bill. Finally, in 2011-12 I chaired an independent commission on enforced removals whose recommendations were forwarded to both the Home Secretary and the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee. This followed the death of an Angolan, Jimmy Mubenga, in an aircraft at Heathrow at the hands of G4S escort officers and on which the coroner’s inquest verdict was unlawful killing. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I focus tonight on the clauses and schedules in the Bill to do with enforced removals.

Before that, I must declare my acute disappointment that yet again a Government have failed to tackle a major millstone that prevents the immigration system from being able to function properly: namely, the 502,412 unresolved cases, of which more than 190,000 were in the migrant refusal pool in July 2013. I was first introduced to this problem one day in 1997 while visiting Birmingham prison, where I was told that a number of foreign national prisoners had gone on hunger strike. When I went to see them I found that they were not foreign nationals who had committed offences, but Asian people who had been living in England for more than 20 years, most married with families and many with their own businesses. They had suddenly been rounded up, mostly in Yorkshire, and taken to Birmingham purely because it appeared to have space, so that their details and their right to remain could be checked. The trouble with having such a millstone around a system’s neck, particularly when resources are limited, is that progress is impossible because so many staff have to spend their time trying to keep its head above water. By progress I mean such things as introducing time limits on the completion of essential bureaucratic processes.

I was faced with a similar, but far smaller situation, when I was commanding troops in Belfast. Every base had a card index for everyone who lived, or had been questioned, in an area, going back several years, which was used to verify the identity of anyone stopped on the streets. Then we were issued with a computer system, but no guidance as to how it was to be loaded with data on literally thousands of cards. The only possible solution was to ground all my military policemen for two weeks and sit them at computers until they had transcribed every detail.

The only way that the Home Office will remove its millstone is to do something similar and draft in temporary staff until the millstone is cleared. Only then will there be time and space for change and improvement. Because of the avoidable damage that a chaotic and dysfunctional immigration system—which seems likely to be made worse by some of the proposals in the Bill—does to the national image, I would have expected that to have been appreciated and actioned years ago. I await the Minister’s comments on that suggestion with interest.

I turn now to Clauses 1 and 2 of Part 1, Clause 58 of Part 5 and Schedules 1 and 7. One of the depressing things about submitting a report to the Home Office, however constructive and well researched, is that you know that no one there will take a blind bit of notice of anything that is not produced in-house. My commission was appalled to find that the restraint techniques used by contracted private sector escort officers were required by the Home Office to be used only in prison. No one had bothered to check with the NHS, which had rejected the pain-compliant prison techniques, devising its own pain-free ones that were more appropriate for patients. Neither had the police, who come under the Home Office and who had developed pain-free techniques suitable for use in crowded and restricted public places such as river ferries been consulted. No training requirements were laid down and escort officers were neither accredited nor licensed. No one in the Home Office is qualified to do this, but no one had thought of approaching the Security Industry Authority, which is.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, the standard of casework is abysmal. All too frequently, escorts are told nothing about the characteristics of the understandably concerned people whom they are to escort until shortly before a flight.

Independent oversight was totally lacking until the Chief Inspector of Prisons was invited to observe a return flight and was appalled at the way in which escorts talked openly to and about returnees in front of him and them. Extraordinarily, independent oversight is said to be the responsibility of the Home Office Professional Standards Unit, which is incapable of doing what is required and bizarrely is itself overseen by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which has nothing to do with asylum casework. It is hard to imagine anything less fit for purpose. We also strongly recommended improved powers for the Immigration Services Commissioner to deal with rogue advisers.

As this detail had not been found by the Home Affairs Select Committee, which had published a report previously on enforced removals, I discussed our findings with its chairman in the fond hope that he might take them formally into evidence in a reopened inquiry, in which case the Home Office might take them seriously, too. But despite assurances from time to time, he has not yet done that, so I hope that amendments to the Bill will provide the vehicle. I do not believe that Clause 1, or paragraph 5 of Schedule 1, which allows untrained and unlicensed immigration officers to use unspecified but allegedly “reasonable force”, when there is such an authentic catalogue of unreasonable force being used by those on Home Office contracts, including a charge of unlawful killing, should be allowed to stand. I go further by suggesting that it would be wholly irresponsible of this House not to try to ensure that current practice is wound up in favour of something more akin to our claim to be a civilised nation.

There is much else in the Bill about which other noble Lords have already expressed their unease. Yet again, we seem destined to spend long hours trying to improve legislation produced in haste and rushed through the other place without sufficient time for scrutiny. Bearing in mind how many Members of Parliament have regular contact with immigration problems in their constituencies, I am surprised that so little was done to amend what was laid before them. No doubt making up for that deficiency is a prospect to which the Minister looks forward with eager anticipation.