UK Borders Bill

My Lords, I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, has returned to the subject of the detention of torture victims and other vulnerable people. Apart from other considerations, it enables me to clarify the purpose of Amendment No. 26, which we debated on Report. I hope that the Minister will assure the House that we are attempting to comply with Article 17; unfortunately lapses occur from time to time, which the BIA is doing its best to address. I take it that is government policy, and we need an assurance from the Minister that that is what they are trying to do. If that is the case, there is no reason why the Minister should object to including those words in the Bill. I concede, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has just done, that not everyone who claims to be a torture victim or to have some other vulnerable characteristic, such as pregnancy, should be released solely on the basis of that claim. In the case of torture victims, there is a recognised procedure for notifying the caseholder of an allegation by letter under Rule 35 of the Detention Centre Rules. I have already expressed our thanks to the Minister for his letter of 9 October, in which he said that a central log of those letters has to be kept at every IRC, and that BIA staff have been reminded to acknowledge the letters and to take them into account in deciding whether detention should be maintained. On Report, the Minister referred to ““agency staff””, but it would be preferable for the duty to be laid on a specific individual who is responsible for that asylum seeker all the way through the process. I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on that point—that we do not lay the duty on the BIA as a whole but on the specific caseholder. On Report, the Minister said that the caseholder was required to acknowledge receipt of the Rule 35 letter and to do so promptly. He then added: "““It may be that the response to the doctor should go beyond a simple acknowledgement. The agency will look at the current guidance to see what more could be said, subject to any issue of confidentiality. For example, the response could indicate to the doctor whether the information about the claim of torture is already known to the BIA and has been considered or whether it is being considered as part of the individual’s asylum application””.—[Official Report, 11/10/07; col. 358.]" Of course, it ought not to be considered solely as part of the asylum application, because there is a specific duty to consider whether continued detention is justified in the case of torture victims, quite apart from the examination of the asylum claim itself. The caseholder is the official who will recommend whether the person is to be released or is to continue to be detained; alternatively, he may decide that there is insufficient information in the Rule 35 letter to enable him to reach a decision. The Medical Foundation comment on the Yarl’s Wood inquiry report at the beginning of the month accused the Home Office of failing to act when told that a detainee had a history of torture, and it is with that in mind that I asked the BIA to go further than a simple acknowledgement. Perhaps the solution would be to invite an independent person such as Stephen Shaw to carry out a quick audit of the procedures, to see whether the review mentioned by the Minister had adequately addressed the criticism made by the chief inspector, who gets to examine particular IRCs only every few years. Her most recent report on Yarl’s Wood was over 18 months ago, so the situation may well have improved; I hope that it has. However, the fact that, apart from torture survivors, other vulnerable people such as mothers with small babies are still being detained there is a cause for concern. The Rule 35 procedure should be extended to other categories of vulnerable people mentioned in Article 17, and responses should be similarly required from the caseholder. Since the doctor has to examine every person who comes into the IRC, it should not create much of an additional burden for either the doctor or the caseholder, particularly if, as we assume, the individual’s vulnerability has already been considered by the caseholder before the decision to detain was made. The inquiry into procedures at Yarl’s Wood highlighted the IND’s failure to act when told of allegations of torture, a criticism that the Medical Foundation had been levelling at the Home Office for many months. The last report by the chief inspector, who had been the first to draw attention to the problem, related to February 2006. I would be grateful if the review that the noble Lord mentioned following that report could be placed in the Library of the House. I personally have not seen it, although maybe I have not done my homework properly. Unfortunately, many vulnerable people are still being detained, such as mothers with small children, for whom Yarl’s Wood is a totally unsuitable environment. If the Minister wants first-hand evidence of that statement, from the Black Women’s Rape Action Project and other women’s organisations that gave stark evidence at a packed meeting in Committee Room 13 a few weeks ago, I would be ready to let him have it. My suggestion is that the Rule 35 procedure be extended from torture survivors to all other categories of vulnerable people. I hope that the Minister will consider that.