UK Borders Bill

The noble Baroness wants the chief inspector to have the power to investigate individual cases, but I confess that I am doubtful about that. The powers of the Chief Inspector of Prisons, who also inspects the IRCs, are determined by Section 5A of the Prison Act 1952, as inserted by Section 57 of the Criminal Justice Act 1982, which does not include any power to examine individual complaints. Other mechanisms exist for the purpose. First and foremost, there are the independent monitoring boards made up of unpaid outside lay persons, of which there is one to every prison or IRC. Society should be immensely grateful to the volunteers who give something like three days a month—sometimes even more—to this demanding and extremely responsible work. Any prisoner or detainee who is unable to resolve a problem through the normal channels has the right to a confidential meeting with a member of the IMB. The next line of defence in prisons is the Prisons and Probations Ombudsman who takes on individual complaints, but who has only looked at certain major problems in the detention estate, such as the alleged racism in Yarl’s Wood some time ago when GSL were in charge. It is certainly a matter for consideration whether the Prison and Probations Ombudsman’s remit should be extended to cover the IRCs. If there is a consensus about the necessity for a formal complaints mechanism, I suggest that that would be a better way to proceed than loading it on to the new inspector. Will the Minister confirm that Anne Owers will not continue to inspect the IRCs but that the inspector mentioned in the Bill will be a new person, still to be appointed to look at the IRCs where no doubt the majority of complaints will arise? If there is to be a formal complaints system of any kind, as opposed to conferring on the chief inspector the right to consider individual cases in the context of a general issue, which she may already do under Clause 47(4), it might lead to the presumption that the removal of a complainant would be stayed until the complaint was dealt with. That would give detainees an incentive to complain at the last minute. If the BIA is successful in reducing the time in detention prior to removal to a matter of a few days, as we hope, very few of the complaints would be resolved by the time that the individual was supposed to depart, which is a fundamental flaw in giving the chief inspector this responsibility. That does not mean to say that there are not a great many complaints about the treatment of detainees in IRCs, and making recommendations on the handling of complaints is one of the responsibilities of the chief inspector under this clause, as it is for the present chief inspector under the present regime. She has a great deal to say in every one of her reports; for example, the most recent one on Campsfield House following a visit at the beginning of November last year. We are now told that the Government’s response to those recommendations has been postponed until after the report by Mr Robert Whalley CB on the disturbances on 14 March. That has been the procedure whenever there is a disturbance at any of the IRCs, which occur with alarming frequency. Surely the Secretary of State ought to be obliged to respond to recommendations by the chief inspector within three months of any report and, where she is not ready with a substantive reply at the end of that period, she ought to be obliged to give reasons for the delay. There is all the more reason why the Government should deal with the chief inspector’s recommendations promptly, when it is quite probable that she had covered the very faults that had given rise to a disturbance. At this stage, I was going to raise with the Minister a letter that I wrote to him this morning, of which I had given prior notice. In view of the lateness of the hour, I think it is best not to burden the Committee with the details of the complaint. Suffice it to say that it was an extremely serious matter of an alleged criminal offence committed in Yarl’s Wood by a person masquerading as a recognised immigration practitioner, who gained entry on two occasions before he was detected on the third occasion. I felt that there was a certain lack of urgency in the investigation of the matter and in the bringing of this individual to justice. I am sure that the Minister will agree that it is an extraordinarily serious offence for anybody to go into an immigration removal centre pretending to be a recognised immigration practitioner and, so it is claimed, to extract sums amounting to hundreds of pounds from vulnerable asylum seekers for services that he is not authorised to provide. He was committing a criminal offence under Section 91 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. I hope that by making his own inquiries, the Minister will ensure that those concerned get their act together. The police, the OISC and the authorities at Yarl’s Wood must get together to decide how this matter is to be handled, so that within a short period of time the Crown Prosecution Service is able to decide whether to issue proceedings against that individual. I now turn to Amendment No. 68. I do not think that the noble Baroness can give the Information Commissioner a role in deciding whether to omit material from the chief inspector’s report for reasons of national security when Section 24 of the Freedom of Information Act confers on the Secretary of State an unqualified right to withhold information from the public on those grounds. If we were to consider giving the Information Commissioner a power to second guess the Secretary of State’s decisions on what information should be withheld from the public on grounds of national security, why should it be confined to this report? The matter should be discussed in the context of legislation amending the Freedom of Information Act, and after seven years’ experience of how it works, there are good arguments to be made for a review. I doubt whether the Information Commissioner has the expertise or competence to decide whether material should be protected from disclosure on grounds of national security. To enable him to form a judgment on those matters would require him to consider all the arguments available to the Secretary of State, which would be a very considerable extra burden. As regards the omission of material that might jeopardise an individual’s safety, I wonder whether it is necessary to have this in the Bill at all. The Minister can remind us whether there is an equivalent provision in Section 57 of the Criminal Justice Act 1982, which deals with the responsibilities of the Chief Inspector of Prisons. If there is not, one would expect that any problems of this kind would be dealt with informally. The chief inspector does not normally refer to individuals by name, but if she did say anything which inadvertently provided clues to a person who might become a target for criminals, one would expect the matter to be dealt with by exchanges between the chief inspector and the department—a common procedure—before the production of any report by an external agency.