Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I begin by offering an apology for my noble friend Lady Hanham, who was unable to stay after our rather lengthy debate on the Postal Services Bill. She asked me to offer my support to my noble kinsman’s amendment and to speak to her Amendment 117A in this group. As the Minister will have realised, both amendments seek better statistics from the Government. He will have heard the extent of concern among many Members of this House, and many parties outside the House, about the lack of statistics and data kept by the UK Border Agency and its contractors on the children it detains or how inadequate they are. We all know how inadequate a great deal of government statistics are. Only the other day, I came across a response to a Question of my honourable friend Mrs Eleanor Laing in another place put to the Department for Transport. She was told that drivers’ records were 81.5 per cent accurate. The Answer stated: ""This equates to 7,906,275 records that are inaccurate".—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/09; col. 488W.]" That is just one example of government statistics. We need government statistics to be accurate and we need government Ministers to treat them with some respect. Some of us remember with some dismay the rather cavalier attitude of certain government Ministers to government statistics relating to knife crime. They released those statistics well before the statistics office said that they ought to, purely because they thought that they could make some good party-political points. What we are asking for are good and accurate statistics. I hope that the noble Lord can respond to that. It is a matter of very great regret that children have to be kept in detention at all, although we recognise that that is sometimes an unavoidable step. However, it is entirely avoidable that the Government should keep their statistics in such a chaotic and unhelpful manner. The statistics published by the Home Office on control of immigration provide only a limited insight into the information held on children in immigration detention. It is not possible, for example, to track "cohorts" or to know how many children were detained over a given period, the length or outcome of their detention, the child’s nationality or at what point in their asylum claim they were detained. If statistics are not routinely collected on the number of such cases held in detention and on the number who are in fact later found to be children, it seems hard to believe that the border agency can itself know or be satisfactorily held to account by others on its policy. Amendment 117A in the name of my noble friend requires the Secretary of State, or the equivalent Scottish Minister where the child is detained in Scotland, to give ministerial authorisation if a child is detained beyond 28 days, and thereafter every seven days. Although, as I have already made clear, it is unfortunate but sometimes necessary that children are detained for the purposes of immigration control, when the detention of children does occur, there must be meaningful safeguards in place. The Secretary of State should have a duty to consider the welfare of the child before detention can continue beyond 28 days in order to ensure that all welfare considerations are properly taken into account. This duty may be seen as an extension of the duty to safeguard the welfare of children under Clause 51, which the Minister must be aware has attracted widespread support across the Committee. My noble friends tabled this amendment because the detention of children must be seen as different from the normal immigration functions, to which Clause 51 applies, in that it requires a specific and separate mention in the Bill. The Government’s immigration policy, if they have one, has been a shambles, and the exercise that it controls over the country’s borders often appears to be tenuous in the extreme. It is entirely unacceptable that children who have had the misfortune to get caught up in the Home Office’s habitual blunders should run any unnecessary risk. It is our hope that, by compelling the Secretary of State to get involved and play an active and supervisory role in the detention of children, young and vulnerable people will be guaranteed a measure of security if they are detained at our borders. I hope that the Minister will recognise the desirability of these safeguards and accept our Amendment 117A.