UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 60: 60: After Clause 35, insert the following new Clause— ““Detention by the Secretary of State (1) Section 62 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (c. 41) (detention by Secretary of State) is amended as follows. (2) In subsection (1) after the word ““person”” in the first line insert the words ““aged eighteen years or over””. (3) After subsection (3) insert— ““(3A) A provision of Schedule 2 to that Act about a person who is detained or liable to detention under that Schedule shall only apply to a person aged eighteen years or over.””.”” The noble Lord said: During the recent inquiry by the Joint Committee on Human Rights into the treatment of asylum seekers, like other Members I was repeatedly struck by the concerns raised by a vast range of agencies, including the Chief Inspector of Prisons, the Children’s Commissioner and many charities working on the front line, including the Refugee Children’s Consortium. Those concerns have been echoed in the House, and I am sure that they will be echoed in the Committee this evening. They focus on why it is necessary to detain children when in practice it is so difficult for families to abscond, as to do so would mean losing contact with all the support that they require, such as healthcare and social services support. We heard very powerfully during our inquiry about the lingering impact that detention has on a child. The only conclusion that we in the committee could reach was that immigration detention was not acceptable for children. In addition, we were clear that detention breaches children’s human rights. It is simply not lawful to deprive a child of their liberty without a time limit simply for administrative purposes. Despite that, nearly 1,600 children a year are detained unnecessarily and at enormous cost. The Government estimate that cost to be on average some £1,230 a week for each detainee. I propose the amendment to support the ending of detention for children. The Government recently announced that they intend to pilot alternatives to detention. It would be helpful to have an indication of what those alternatives are and whether the Government can really reassure us that this is the first step towards an end to the detention of children for immigration purposes altogether. The Government have said that they detain children only as a last resort and for as short a period as possible. Yet the statistics that I have seen suggest that is not the reality for many children. For example, Save the Children found children who were detained for up to 268 days in 2005. That is backed by other members of the Refugee Children’s Consortium. What we are witnessing is ongoing detention throughout the asylum process and, most worryingly, in many cases people are being detained and subsequently released. I cannot overemphasise how damaging this is to the children concerned. The Children’s Society told me about a family with which it is, and had been, working for some time before it was detained. The mother suffered some very severe health complications in detention, from which she still suffers, and the father is now severely depressed. The family was granted temporary release from detention and is still in the United Kingdom. The five-year-old son did not speak at all for some time after he was released, and he still cannot visit the charity’s support project because the bars on one of the windows produce such a strong reaction and remind him of his experience in Yarl’s Wood. As he cannot talk about that experience, it is still not really understood what it means for him. That family is still here. As is the case for half the people detained, according to the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees, the family was released on temporary release. So the assurances we have about detention are simply not adequate to protect children. Over the past few years, we have witnessed increasingly tough asylum policies, not least in the Bill. As I have argued before, nowhere is there a balance in the system to consider the welfare of the child. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly establishes that the well-being and best interests of each child should at all times be central to all considerations. We need champions for the children caught up in this ghastly experience. That is why I am advocating that children should not be detained, but if they are, Amendment No. 61 would require that, before a decision is taken to detain a child, there must be an independent welfare assessment to consider whether it is necessary to inflict such deep-rooted damage on him, as in the case I highlighted earlier. If we are serious about preventing children arbitrarily languishing in the system, deprived of their liberty, why can we not have a seven-day limit? Why not build that mechanism into the system to change not only practice but mindsets? The Committee may be relieved to hear that this is the last of my amendments in Committee. I know that I have said before what I am about to say. However, I would not have found time in my programme—like the programmes of the other Members of this Committee, it is quite busy—to spend hours here if I did not feel passionately about these issues. We must recognise that there are people at the heart of any system that we implement, and that, when that person is a child, we must fulfil our responsibilities. Any claim to be a decent, civilised society demands that. We are dealing not with statistics and averages but with an accumulation of individual and tragic cases. If we as a society lose the ability to see it in those terms, we are in deep water when it comes to the future value of our society. I beg to move.