Immigration Bill (Third sitting)

Rebecca Harris Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Champion]

Q 217 Does the rest of the panel agree with that sentiment?

Adrian Berry: Yes. At the moment, the issue with the innovation in bail provisions proposed in the Bill is that there are difficulties with allowing, for example, the Home Office to vary a condition set by the tribunal. That is more than a cosmetic change. You have independent judicial provision for granting bail and for setting the terms after a hearing. A judge takes a view of what conditions should be imposed. The Home Office can then vary them at their own suit, possibly having lost the argument before an independent judge. You end up with a situation where conditions may be difficult to respect in practical terms, and that will have an impact.

The issue with the provisions in the Bill regarding bail goes beyond that, because it also deals with this idea of branding people as on bail when they have simply come to this country seeking admission. Hitherto, such people have been on temporary admission, which is a different sort of status. There is also an issue about the creation of a culture of presumption of detention and the presumption that you are on bail when, in fact, you have simply come to the country and sought admission, and you are lawfully here without any risk of absconding.

This rebranding is of a piece with the power grab, if you like, on the part of the Home Office against independent judicial scrutiny. What is really required is independent judicial oversight of bail at regular periods, so that you do not get into a situation where you have unlawful detention—in other words, where the detention is without legal foundation because it is unreasonable in most cases or it is contrary to the Home Office’s own policy. Without independent regular judicial oversight, you are going to have more unlawful detention cases and more compensation being paid out. As people have said, nobody wants that. It is not a good situation.

Colin Yeo: The Bill will have the effect of reducing scrutiny rather than increasing it. It turns independent hearings into, virtually, a charade. There is no point in having a hearing in front of an independent judge about whether you should be released and what the conditions should be, and arguing them out in court, when the Secretary of State has a power under the Bill to impose whatever conditions they want immediately afterwards. That reduces scrutiny heavily, and turns the whole thing into a charade, rather than increasing scrutiny, as we would like.

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

Q 218 Am I right in thinking, though, that the Government are reviewing the whole issue of detention in parallel with this Bill?

Jerome Phelps: Yes, we understand that there is an internal review taking place, and the Stephen Shaw review into welfare and detention is reporting around now. In that context, we welcome the decision to announce the closure of Dover immigration removal centre as suggesting a very positive intention to use detention more smartly. I hope that that reflects the overall direction of travel and that the Bill does nothing to get in the way of that.

[Simon Hoare]

Q 219 I am not quite sure that that last bit was welcome news to my hon. Friend the Member for Dover, but we will wait to see.

May I ask each of you to take up your fantasy job? Close your eyes and pretend you are the Home Secretary. It might be your nightmare job—I do not know—but let us suppose it is your fantasy job. We have heard a lot about something to do with principle, something to do with process and something to do with practicality. Imagine you had a clean sheet of paper. Would it be easier for the Government, effectively, to declare an amnesty for everybody who is here now and to start from scratch? Or could they go still further and have no controls at all—effectively, Schengen, but wider—with people just coming to the country as and when, and no longer coming when the jobs run out? That would seem a lot easier.

Don Flynn: The Migrants Rights Network come at this from the point of view that immigration is part of the world in the 21st century. However it is managed and governed by national authorities—we certainly concede that it needs to be managed and governed by them—it has to be conceded that migrants should have rights and are not simply subject to an authority that can push them from pillar to post, taking executive decisions about providing them with reasonable options about how they advance their life chances, without giving them an opportunity to state their own case. We think it is quite possible to lay down a set of principles to govern that. We know what rights migrants need in order to prosper, to feel a degree of security and to tackle the complex issues of integration and providing for the needs of their families. These have been set out in United Nations and International Labour Organisation conventions. A good starting point for us in terms of addressing immigration policy is to see how we can transpose those into national law and make them effective. That is the discussion we would like to see with Governments: how do we design an immigration system which acknowledges the inevitability, and even the necessity, of migration, and how do we do deals with migrants that are fair and allow them to prosper?