UK Borders Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, for having tabled this amendment. I apologise for not having spoken at Second Reading and for coming in at a relatively late stage. I put my name to the amendment because I feel that it is incredibly important. I speak as a clinician, not from a political standpoint. We know that, under Rule 35, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate collates pro forma letters informing of alleged torture, but there is no feedback in this process. Therefore, it is purely a paper exercise which could be deemed almost meaningless. What are the problems? There are problems in identifying victims of torture for several reasons. First, especially early on, they rarely disclose that they have been tortured and the way in which they have been tortured because they are deeply traumatised by what has happened to them. They do not know who to trust. They do not know whether by confiding in one person they will make their situation worse. They are disoriented, often both about place and their own identity, because part of the process of torture is to begin to break the person’s internal spirit, their knowledge of who they are and their own personhood. The other problem is that they suffer flashbacks and are deeply, deeply traumatised. Sometimes what has happened to them is so awful and so painful that they cannot bring themselves to talk about it. We all know or have seen survivors from the Second World War who have never spoken to anybody until they get near their own death, when they may finally talk about some of the things that they have suffered—even when they have their own family to trust. That is the depth of the trauma that they may be dealing with. We know, too, that the Immigration and Nationality Directive healthcare staff are not trained in handling victims of torture. They do not know how to ask questions in a way to facilitate disclosure. The Border and Immigration Agency officers have little or no training, and they do not ask questions about torture in the screening interview at all. It is not a subject that is raised or allowed on the table. The second big problem is that these people who are so deeply traumatised need care, treatment and support. Without that their situation is aggravated by being left and ignored. We know that incarceration is a disaster for them. The Yarl’s Wood report highlighted how deeply damaging it is. David Rhys Jones from the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture said: "““Detaining torture survivors is apt to trigger flashbacks and nightmares. They experience very real mental anguish at being locked up. Once the Home Office has been notified, such detainees should be released so their cases can be properly appraised without them being subject to further suffering””." I fully accept that it is a sad reality that some people in seeking asylum will claim to have been tortured when they have not. It is a sad fact of how human beings behave. It is incredibly important that these people are not only assessed, but repeatedly reassessed. It is that process of reassessment that builds up trust and allows them to disclose, and that process reveals who is making a false claim versus who really has suffered terribly. It is the most reliable way to discriminate between these groups. Given that some people have no external marks at all, that becomes particularly important. However, I would point out that the Government in their White Paper, Fairer, Faster and Firmer, which goes back to July 1998, recognised that there was a problem. Yet holding asylum seekers in prison now conflicts with that policy. It is also contrary to the guidelines from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and from the recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture. To ignore that would seem to make a mockery of the Home Office’s previous undertaking, and it would seem to compound the unspeakable and gross inhumanity of the torture that these people have already suffered to incarcerate them, lock them up—often with people with a criminal background, who have no understanding or wish to understand or support them.