Immigration (Guidance on Detention of Vulnerable Persons) Regulations 2018 Detention Centre (Amendment) Rules 2018

Stuart C McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 6th June 2018 General Committees

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. I have no hesitation in joining the opposition to these two draft statutory instruments. I thank the right hon. Member for Enfield North for kicking off the process of challenging them and for securing a debate on the detention of vulnerable migrants next week.

My party’s position is that the large-scale, routine detention of thousands of people, including vulnerable people, in what are essentially private prisons, for indeterminate periods, simply at the discretion of immigration officers, is a scandal. It is a stain on our democracy and an affront to the rule of law.

On the matter of scale, which the Minister always attempts to play down, 26,000 individuals each year—3,000 at any one time—is not something to celebrate. That is an horrendous number and is massive in scale next to comparable countries. It is clear that we are detaining many people whose removal is not imminent—around half are released back into the public.

Detention in those places is a harmful experience for anyone. By its very nature it makes detainees vulnerable. That vulnerability can be exacerbated depending on personal, social and environmental factors. Vulnerability will vary over the period of detention. Stephen Shaw’s first review states:

“Detention in and of itself undermines welfare and contributes to vulnerability.”

As we have heard, it also has atrocious implications for mental health. Nevertheless, the UK continues to detain vulnerable people on a huge scale, including too often people with serious mental illnesses. The detention of people with serious mental illnesses was described by Mr Shaw in his first report as

“an affront to civilised values”.

Torture survivors and victims of serious violence and ill-treatment are particularly vulnerable to harm. Contrary to what the Government claim, organisations such as Freedom from Torture and Medical Justice are concerned that the specific changes proposed in these SIs will undermine the safeguarding of victims of torture and ill-treatment. That is because the changes place an impossible task on detention centre medical practitioners, with a definition of torture that is overly complex because it introduces a concept of powerlessness that has dubious links to vulnerability to harm and will require detailed and excessive interrogation of a vulnerable person.

Victims of severe ill-treatment and violence risk being excluded from the protections offered in the detention centre rules and guidance. The changes also increase the evidentiary burden on torture survivors. No longer will the guidance simply require independent evidence of torture to justify exclusion from detention, but specific evidence will be needed that detention is likely to cause harm. That requires to be seen alongside the fact that the guidance now includes a broader range of immigration factors that can justify detention, even of torture survivors, which explains the plummet in the number of releases following rule 35 reports that we have heard about.

Medical Justice and Freedom from Torture propose that we withdraw these statutory instruments until we see the Shaw review. The arguments for not waiting for Shaw were unconvincing. Going further, they argue that there is no need for a specific definition of torture and that the category of vulnerability should be broadened to include other victims of serious violence and ill-treatment, as recommended in the UNHCR detention guidelines. There should be a presumption, not a burden of proof, that such individuals are vulnerable to harm, and we should make their detention truly exceptional rather than having the Home Office with a further list of excuses for keeping them in detention. That is a sensible way ahead on these statutory instruments.