Immigration Detention: Trafficking and Modern Slavery

Stuart C McDonald Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2019 Westminster Hall

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

It is good to see you in the Chair, Sir Gary. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) on securing the debate and on a characteristically powerful and comprehensive introduction to the subject.

I pay tribute to all hon. Members who have contributed to today’s debate. They have pointed out how well timed it is, given that two new, excellent reports have been published in recent days, one by Women for Refugee Women and one by After Exploitation. I pay tribute to groups that continue to campaign for the rights of those who have been detained. As the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) said, this issue should be on the front page, but it is not. Immigration detention centres are often far out of sight and mind, and those groups do sterling work in keeping these issues on the political agenda.

As we have heard, we have had a large number of reports and expert inquiries into detention, including Stephen Shaw’s review and the reports by the Home Affairs Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights. There will be another report that touches on this subject in the not too distant future. Last week, the Home Affairs Committee continued to hear evidence on modern slavery, with some pretty damning evidence from three witnesses about the significant numbers of modern slavery and trafficking survivors being detained. A lot of excellent submissions have been made to the Committee.

All those submissions and reports highlight the same thing: the frustrating, systemic public policy failure that the hon. Member for Gedling referred to, which sees so many victims of slavery and trafficking detained. At the outset, it is important to put on the record that we remember the harm that is done by immigration detention. As Stephen Shaw explained in his first report,

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

It is a hellish thing to inflict on anybody, especially victims of crime, and some cases were highlighted vividly and horrifyingly by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and the hon. Members for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) and for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney).

On the broader question of immigration detention, as I repeat every time we debate this subject, my party and I believe that the widespread routine detention of many thousands of people for an indeterminate period in what are effectively private prisons, simply at the discretion of immigration officers, is nothing short of a scandal. It has been fairly described as a stain on our democracy and an affront to the rule of law. The current system detains too many people. It detains people who should never have been detained, and it detains people for too long and without a defined time limit. The safeguards are utterly inadequate. The system is costly and inefficient, and does not even achieve what it is supposed to, with many people being simply released back into the community again.

I recognise that there has been some progress in cutting the size of the immigration detention estate, but there is a long way to go, and we need to go much further and much faster. In terms of the detention of vulnerable victims, including trafficking and slavery survivors, some of the evidence suggests that we have gone backwards in the last few years. In short, the systems and policies are not working as they should. The adults at risk policy, in particular, is not preventing many vulnerable victims of trafficking and slavery from ending up in detention.

Signs of trafficking or slavery are being missed at various stages. Even when such signs are picked up, they are either ignored, as we have heard, not acted on, or given less weight than factors relating to immigration control. We need urgent reform to stop that happening. Importantly, as I think my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central alluded to, we need to think about changing who makes key decisions and who has oversight of them. A host of changes could and should be made to help to eliminate the detention of vulnerable people. Our policy goal must be a bar on the detention of trafficking and modern slavery victims.

As a small starting point, we need to see significant improvements in awareness and understanding of the issue among those who are most likely to encounter victims in the first place. That includes police, most obviously, and staff in the Department for Work and Pensions or elsewhere. Treating victims as criminals or as illegal immigrants, rather than recognising them as victims, is a disastrous start to the process. If we can improve the response at that stage, problems further down the line could clearly be avoided.

We also need to look again at the precise processes that are supposed to stop detention after those first encounters occur. Gatekeeping is quite simply not working. Desk-based reviews of selective information will never achieve the sensitive and informed assessment that needs to be made. The Home Office should not be balancing vulnerability against immigration control requirements. If an individual is suspected of being a victim, detention should not happen at all.

Turning to the issue I referred to of who is making decisions, the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) mentioned the conflicting policy goals that the Home Office, as a Department, is wrestling with. A whole host of organisations have commented on that. Quite simply, looking after the interests of trafficking victims on the one hand, and relentlessly pursuing immigration enforcement on the other, are irreconcilable. To the greatest extent possible, we need to look at how decision making in trafficking cases can be removed from the Home Office altogether. For example, decisions about referral through the national referral mechanism for those in detention, or those being considered for detention, should be made by independent first responders or another independent body altogether.

Finally, I turn to the issue of oversight. As we know, a series of cross-party amendments have been tabled to the Immigration Bill that would introduce the time limit on detention I think everyone present seeks and that would strengthen judicial oversight. I very much hope that that becomes a reality. Given the experiences highlighted in the new Women for Refugee Women report, the report is accurately titled “From one hell to another”. We cannot have it on our conscience that, every year, we inflict that journey on hundreds—possibly even thousands—of people. I hope the Minister will listen to all the constructive suggestions that have been made, and the powerful arguments that have been made for reform, so that we stop inflicting that journey on so many victims of modern slavery and trafficking.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Nokes]

It is difficult for me to comment on the application to individuals, but I will certainly come back to the hon. Gentleman with a fuller response to that point.

Several comments were made about the reform of the national referral mechanism and the importance of ensuring that the NRM gets victims of modern slavery the support they need. We have made significant progress in delivering that complex reform programme, including the launch of the single competent authority, which is an expert caseworking unit responsible for all NRM decisions, regardless of an individual’s nationality or immigration status. That unit has replaced the competent authorities previously located in UK Visas and Immigration, Immigration Enforcement and the National Crime Agency. To improve the decision-making process, we have set up an independent, multi-agency assurance panel of experts to review all negative conclusive grounds decisions, adding significantly to the scrutiny such cases receive.

The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) mentioned the detention of children. I wish to reassure her that the UK ended the routine detention of children in immigration removal centres in 2010 and then enshrined that in primary legislation in the Immigration Act 2014. There remain limited circumstances in which children may be detained, but that is usually in a family unit immediately prior to removal. That requires ministerial authority should a family be detained for more than 72 hours, and there is a maximum of one week. I reassure her that this year—in 2019—no children have been detained at Dungavel immigration removal centre. There was one age dispute case, but the individual was found to be an adult.

The hon. Member for Edmonton mentioned women in immigration detention, and we heard from several Members about Yarl’s Wood. On 6 June this year, the independent monitoring board published its Yarl’s Wood annual report for 2018. The IMB made positive comments about the continuing efforts at the centre to retain and recruit female staff and to improve healthcare provision. We have considered all the recommendations in the report and an action plan has been drawn up in response to concerns raised. We take our responsibilities towards detainees’ health and welfare very seriously. The provision of 24-hour, seven-day-a-week healthcare in all immigration removal centres, including Yarl’s Wood, ensures that individuals have ready access to medical professionals and levels of primary care in line with individuals in the community.

The hon. Lady also raised the specific issue of victims of trafficking from Nigeria. Last summer, or perhaps last autumn, I travelled to Nigeria and listened to harrowing accounts of people who had been trafficked. I also heard about some of the measures that the Nigerian Government were taking to address what is a very serious problem in that country. I am very conscious that there are significant numbers of Nigerians among victims of human trafficking found in detention in Libya or attempting to cross the Mediterranean. A disproportionate number of Nigerian victims of international trafficking come from Edo state in the south-west, where long-standing trafficking networks operate.

Modern slavery programming in Nigeria is a cross-Government effort, with each Department—the Home Office, the Department for International Development and the National Crime Agency—working co-operatively and focusing on areas of comparative advantage. The Home Office’s own modern slavery fund programme provides support and reintegration assistance to victims of trafficking and supports the judiciary to process trafficking. In addition, DFID funding has been directed to the International Organisation for Migration to rehabilitate victims returned from Libyan detention camps. That is a separate cohort of victims from those supported by Home Office funding. There is a real need for us to continue to work with DFID to help develop livelihood options for communities at risk of trafficking in Edo state and to help local government and civil society respond to trafficking there.

The hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton raised some issues with rule 35 of the detention centre rules. We are committed to ensuring that the rule 35 process operates effectively as a reporting system for removal centre doctors’ concerns about the welfare of detainees. In March this year, we launched our targeted consultation on the overhaul of the detention centre rules. The operation of rule 35 is a key element of that and is closely linked to the operation of the adults at risk policy. Input from non-governmental organisations, the independent detention oversight bodies and medical experts will ensure that the replacement for rule 35 better supports the identification, reporting and caseworker consideration of people with vulnerabilities. In the year 1 April 2018 to 31 March this year, 2,146 individuals were the subject of a rule 35 report made by a medical practitioner.

Various hon. Members mentioned the adults at risk policy. In September 2016, we implemented the adults at risk in immigration detention policy, a key part of our response to Stephen Shaw’s original review of the welfare of vulnerable people in immigration detention. The policy does not, as some have interpreted it as doing, mean an automatic exemption from immigration detention for any particular group of people. Under the policy, vulnerable people are detained, or their detention continued, only when the immigration considerations in their particular case outweigh evidence of vulnerability. Cases are reviewed regularly and also when new evidence comes to light.

I appreciate that there has been criticism of the adults at risk policy. However, as Mr Shaw said in his follow-up review last year,

“it would be folly to give up on the Adults at Risk policy. It is best thought of as an exercise in cultural change, and like all such programmes it will take time to reach full fruition. The focus on vulnerability that”

the policy

“has engendered is a genuine one”.

I believe that the policy will prove its full worth as it develops further and once it and the systems around it are in full alignment. Stephen Shaw made a number of recommendations for improvements in these areas and we are working hard, in conjunction with experts and in discussion with external organisations, to make the system as effective, protective and workable as possible.

It is worth remembering that the adults at risk policy replaced a policy that determined whether vulnerable people should be detained by reference to the concept of “very exceptional circumstances”. The difficulty with that approach was that nobody—caseworkers, legal representatives or detainees themselves—could interpret that in a consistent way. The adults at risk policy represents a much more coherent way of assessing the appropriateness of detention of vulnerable people and is a rational and proportionate approach.

Several hon. Members challenged me with the question, “What has changed?” That is a really important part of the comments I want to make and something I really wish to emphasise. We are committed to reducing the number of people in detention, to improving the welfare of those who are detained and to providing appropriate support to the most vulnerable in detention. Detention is used sparingly for securing the removal of individuals who do not have leave to remain in the UK, and people are detained for as short a time as possible.

We are detaining fewer people. At the end of December 2018, there were 30% fewer individuals in detention than a year earlier, and it is likely that that figure will be lower still this year. Over time, changes in legislation, policy and operational procedures will reduce the number of those detained and the duration of detention before removal, in turn improving the welfare of those detained.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

The Minister referred to work done in response to Stephen Shaw’s follow-up review. Will she confirm whether the Home Office is looking again at the gatekeeper process? Those 400 individuals who had referrals made after they were put into detention will all have been through that process, yet they did so without anyone picking up signs that they were a victim of slavery or trafficking.

[Caroline Nokes]

The gatekeeper function remains under close scrutiny. I and the many individual monitors who look at our detention system have scrutinised and continue to scrutinise the process of detention gatekeeping. The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that if people have been through the detention gatekeeper function and still vulnerabilities have not been picked up, it is right that we continue to reinforce those processes.

When it comes to numbers, before 2015 there were about 4,200 detention beds in the estate. Since then, we have rationalised and modernised the estate. We have closed Campsfield immigration removal centre and reduced occupancy levels in the other IRCs, in turn improving staff-to-detainee ratios. There are almost 40% fewer beds—about 2,600 fewer—than there were four years ago, and they are of significantly higher quality.