Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 7th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I shall start by paying three compliments. I am afraid that my complimenting will cease there. First, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, not only on his thorough covering of all the issues, which I shall not repeat, but on tabling this Motion. Secondly, I thank Thomas Brown for his admirable Library briefing. Thirdly, and this is nothing to do with the subject other than that he is to follow me in the debate, I say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle how much I and, I am sure, many other noble Lords have appreciated the way he has read the Psalms this week.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, I recognise that this report is not entirely negative about what has been achieved, but Mr David Bolt, the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, has described the Government’s response to his report, of which it accepted only two, while partially accepting five, of his seven recommendations, as “disappointing”. As the noble Lord mentioned, he added that the Government—meaning the Home Office —appeared,

“closed to the idea that there is any room for improvement”,

in how the scheme was managed and operated.

These last words immediately resonated with me because I have had countless experiences of exactly the same Home Office attitude to outside recommendations since I first became associated with the immigration system in 1997. As Chief Inspector of Prisons, I was asked to take on the inspection of what were then called immigration detention centres. Almost immediately, I was asked to inspect Campsfield House near Gatwick, where I found that a series of riots, which had resulted in the destruction of the library and much other damage, had been started by a group who I did not think met the criteria for immigrant detainees, namely ex-prisoners. They had been sentenced to be deported, but instead of having their deportation processed while they were in prison—so that, at the end of their sentence, they were taken straight to the airport and out, as happens in the UAE, for example—the deportation process was only started when they arrived at an immigration detention centre, following release from prison. I have been campaigning against this practice since 1998 and have recommended change many times in this House, without success.

I also found that immigration detention centres were using totally inappropriate prison rules, as opposed to UN and European detention rules, on the orders of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, in the Home Office, which was responsible for the immigration system. After my inspection, my inspectors, working with officials from the directorate, produced more appropriate rules that are still in use today.

Together with my noble friends Lord Sandwich and Lady Mar, I was a commissioner on an independent asylum commission which reported in 2009 with more than 70 recommendations after an exhaustive investigation in which we involved the then UK Border Agency. Regrettably, we found what we described as a “culture of disbelief” in the Home Office, fuelled by the direction that it was then under from Tony Blair that there was to be a tipping point beyond which no further immigrants should be admitted, the policy being for officials to ensure that more applications were refused than granted. The most public manifestation of this attitude was when the then Minister for Immigration, when asked about our report on “The World at One”, about which I had spoken on the “Today” programme, replied that he had not read it but disbelieved every word of it.

I shall not go through every disappointing dealing with the immigration department of the Home Office, which the noble Lord, Lord Reid, when he was Home Secretary, dubbed as “not fit for purpose”, except to mention two which are germane to this debate. In 2012, I chaired an independent inquiry into the unlawful killing by G4S escorts on an aircraft at Heathrow of Jimmy Mubenga, an Angolan whose removal they were enforcing. During this inquiry, in which I again invited a senior Home Office official to attend every meeting, we became extremely concerned about the poor quality of casework, including the lack of supervision. We made a number of recommendations, none of which has been actioned, designed to improve the whole process of enforced removal. The fact that I had so many knowledgeable experts on my panel, and that all our evidence was carefully documented, was studiously ignored by the Home Office.

Together with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, I took part in the Refugees All-Party Parliamentary Group’s review of the asylum and immigration system, which reported in 2015 and in which we recommended a review of the whole immigration system because there were so many flaws in it—a recommendation I would repeat today. Control of our borders is a laughable proposition under the current dysfunctional system, and I have no idea how it will cope with the demands of Brexit or the inevitable strains that will be put on it by population movement, possibly inflated by climate change.

Therefore, I plead with the Minister to encourage the Home Office, and particularly that part of it involved with the immigration process, to change the bad habits of the last too many years and stop deluding itself that all its operations are adequately managed. If it continues to refuse to listen to, or take account of, advice from those who know more about the realities of the human content of the immigration process than officials appear to do, then God save us as a nation.