Committee (4th Day)

Part of Immigration Bill – in the House of Lords at 4:00 pm on 3 February 2016.

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Photo of Lord Ramsbotham Lord Ramsbotham Crossbench 4:00, 3 February 2016

My Lords, I am proud to be British and was both proud and privileged to serve for nearly 41 years in the British Army. But I have to admit that I am not proud of much of the thrust of this Bill, which seems to be based on the assumption that every would-be immigrant or asylum seeker is illegal, and should be treated as such. That is akin to regarding everyone awarded a prison sentence as being a combination of mass murderer, armed robber, rapist, arsonist and paedophile, and treating them accordingly. The vast majority of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers are legal, which should be the default thrust of any regulatory legislation.

On 12 July 1910, the then Home Secretary, the 36 year-old Winston Churchill, winding up a debate on prison estimates, said that the way in which any country treated crime and criminals was the true test of its civilisation. He could well have added immigrants and asylum seekers. On Monday night, I heard the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, read from his brief an assertion that:

“The Government already have a raft of guidance and standards in place for ensuring that the regimes in detention centres operate at appropriate levels and in the interests of the welfare of detainees”.—[Hansard, 1/1/16; col.1696.]

In view of my experiences while inspecting them, I thought of Churchill and was completely flabbergasted. Has no one in the Home Office paid the slightest bit of attention to inspection report after inspection report, which point out that what the Minister described as,

“a raft of guidance and standards”,

is not subject to any meaningful oversight? For “appropriate”, he should have said “'wholly unsatisfactory”. So stunned was I that I totally failed to ask the Minister what the word appropriate meant, and who in the Home Office was responsible and accountable for allegedly ensuring the operation of such regimes, and whether their reports could be made available to noble Lords.

That was bad enough. But Clause 34 is so far outside the rule of law, let alone what decent people regard as civilised, that I am ashamed to think that anyone British was responsible for the concept, let alone its inclusion in the Bill. I know that the Court of Appeal has ruled that the imposition under the Immigration Act 2014 of out-of-country appeals in deportation cases is legal, but such appellants have committed serious crimes and received substantial prison sentences before being deported. How can any Home Office Minister seriously bring forward so draconian a proposal for those whose presence in the United Kingdom is entirely legal knowing that, currently, 61% of immigration appeals are either allowed, remitted for the Home Office to retake its decision or acknowledged by the Home Office to be flawed before a hearing? This means that 61% of those whom Ministers intend to force to make their appeal from abroad will have legal grounds for compensation, which is bound to add up to more than the cost of continuing to do the decent and civilised thing.

Included in the 61%, as the Solicitor-General acknowledged to the Committee and the other place, is an appeal success rate of 42%, which the latest figures from the Asylum Support Tribunal show to have risen to 44%. On what grounds do the Government think their proposal to force legal, as well as illegal, potential appellants to leave the United Kingdom before appealing against such appalling and proven faulty decision-taking is justified, appropriate and civilised?

There is one group of people for whom the Government’s proposal is even more uncivilised: children —as the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Alton, the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich mentioned. Among the 631,000 undocumented migrants living in the United Kingdom today are an estimated 120,000 irregular migrant children, more than half of whom were born here. Research by the Coram Children’s Legal Centre has highlighted that the environment for irregular or undocumented migrant children in the United Kingdom and their ability to have their legal claims to remain considered fairly have already deteriorated considerably.

The provisions of Clause 34 risk children being deprived of their parents or forced to leave the country they grew up in, before any judicial scrutiny of a Home Office decision and without adequate consideration of their best interests. As we have heard, the Home Secretary has a duty under Section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 to safeguard and promote the welfare of children with respect to its immigration, asylum and enforcement functions. Established law on children’s best interests makes it clear that decision-makers must first understand the best interests of a child before considering any countervailing public interest factors.

However, research by the Refugee Children’s Consortium shows that children’s best interests are not systematically and comprehensively assessed within immigration decision-making. Furthermore, a UNHCR audit of the Home Office’s procedures has highlighted that there is no formal and systematic collection or recording of information that will be necessary and relevant to making a quality best interest consideration, nor any mechanism for obtaining the views of a child and giving them weight in line with their age and maturity. The Home Office usually includes in any decision letter a statement that the best interests of the child have been taken into account, but routinely does not give any adequate reasons for the conclusions drawn.

In the light of all this evidence, which points to the need for urgent reform of the current decision-making process, is the Minister confident that current Home Office decision-makers, with their proven track record of failure, could guarantee to a court of law that the Home Secretary’s duty has been honoured in every appeal case involving a child?

There is an old saying that justice delayed is justice denied. Currently, immigration appeals are being listed at least six months ahead, and it is not uncommon for appellants to have to wait for a year or more for their appeal to be heard. As I have said more than once during the passage of this monster Bill, it is imperative that the Government codify and simplify their immigration and asylum system, so that those on the front line have the tools to enable them to act quickly and efficiently when it comes under even greater pressure in the years ahead—which it undoubtedly will. Above all, that means having a decision-making process that is efficient, fair and transparent, which the current one is not.

A civilised nation would ensure that its immigration system is fair and includes checks and balances, such as an appeals process—the ability of an appellant to give oral evidence being a central component of any fair hearing. Clause 34 violates all that, and I therefore hope that, in justifying any claim that the United Kingdom has to be thought civilised, it will be removed from both government thinking and this Bill.