New Clause 8 - Detention by Secretary of State
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill
10:30 am
Ms Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Citizenship and Immigration), Home Office; Stretford and Urmston, Labour)
First, I understand and share the starting point for many members of the Committee that the issue is serious. Of course the detention of UK children with their parents and on their own is not without precedent, but the detention of a child in any circumstances is serious. When that child is not the subject himself of concern—either because he has committed offences or is for some other reason at risk—his detention is perhaps even more serious.
I come to this in very much the same spirit as other hon. Friends and hon. Members, but I also feel that members of the Committee have to open their minds to the reality of some of the dilemmas we face; real dilemmas involving individual families in terms of past behaviour and the risk presented in immigration terms by their parents. I do not believe that a blanket inability ever to detain an adult where they have a child attached is the right way forward; nor, equally, while there is tremendous pressure in the system to keep both the numbers down and the length of stay down, is the imposition of what would be inevitably arbitrary but well-meaning time limits. These, in themselves, would create the kind of perverse incentive that we want to avoid. I will get to that point in a moment.
New clause 8 would seek to prevent the detention of children and young persons under 18 under any circumstances. New clause 13 would, for the first time, set a statutory time limit on the detention of children and young persons under 18. To clarify, our policy at present is that detention may be appropriate for people when the identity and basis of claim needs to be established; for people who are unlikely to comply with the conditions of temporary admission or release; and to effect removal.
In addition, where a person's asylum claim appears to be capable of being decided quickly, they may be detained as part of a fast-track process. For the vast majority of people detained, that is after a decision on a claim has been made and been refused. They are not usually children of refugees or even children of potential refugees, although some people in the fast-track process might fall into that category. However, largely because they are in the fast-track process, they are, by definition, very unlikely to have a positive decision on their asylum claim. We are not talking
about people who have had or are likely to have a positive decision on their asylum claim. These are people whom we would be seeking to remove.
The policy on the use of detention applies both to families, including those with minor children, and to single adults, and all decisions are taken on the basis of the individual circumstances. I should like to raise three main points. First, it is sometimes necessary to detain a family with children because of the risk to immigration controls that that family presents and because of the dilemma presented. I have been seeing these cases in detail for some time, but now I receive weekly reports on more cases coming up to the 28-day mark. There are very few; none the less, these are the most difficult cases.
An example of one case is a mother who arrived in the UK late in 2000. She was refused leave to enter but granted temporary admission in order to return home. She absconded. She had a baby in late 2002, but she disappeared. She was next encountered when she was arrested late last year, 2003, for serious drug offences. Her son was then taken into care because she had been arrested. She applied for asylum after she had been arrested. That was the first asylum claim. She and her son were to be removed on an emergency travel document, issued by their own authority, but the issue of that document has been delayed because when she registered her son's name with an alias. Therefore, we are now in difficulties with her country of origin about her identity and whether she is a national of that country. Detention is necessary while her identity is established and we try to remove her to her country of origin. There is no prospect of a voluntary departure and there is a high risk that she will abscond again.
Hers is not untypical of the difficult cases that we are discussing. There are only two alternatives to detention. The first is to release her and her child together, in which case she will certainly abscond, go to ground, and disappear: we will not be able to trace her, and she, like others, will not comply with reporting procedures. The second is to take the baby back into care: he is very young and has hardly been with his mother, so if we take him into care until we can release her and put them on a plane together, they will not know each other. Who can say that that is in the interests of the child? I cannot. In such cases, it is in the interests of children that we keep them with their parent or parents. We do not make up such cases; this is the reality that the immigration department has to deal with in the small number of difficult cases in which we have to have the option of detention.
We are talking about a small minority of cases, none the less. I shall come to the statistics in a moment. The hon. Member for Perth said that there are other options and asks why we cannot have reporting. I do not know where she thinks that the vast majority of families who never go into detention are. In fact, they are living in the community, their children are in school, they comply with reporting and when we are in a position to remove them, they are removed. If they do go into detention, it is for one or two nights in order to get them on to a plane. Reporting is used wherever
we can use it. It is what we want to do, because it makes economic sense and is in the interests of the family. However, some families will not comply and will not go home voluntarily. For them, we have to make provision for detention.