There is a particular difficulty with the speed at which we determine the age of young people at the moment and it varies significantly from one borough to another. I encourage the Home Office to work closely with local authorities to try to speed that process up.
My point is that we have managed to do such a thing for families with children and a great deal of learning has happened in the Home Office that we could extend to adults held in detention. We are managing to remove people whom we want to remove without putting them into detention, and a great deal of good and innovative thinking has been happening. It would be fantastic if good practice in one area of the Home Office was to extend to other areas of the Department. A 28-day limit would sharpen the mind of the Home Office and encourage it to get on and do that.
Amendment 57 would ensure that people had an opportunity to challenge their detention by ensuring that it came up regularly for review. The review would
first happen shortly after they went into detention and then at intervals thereafter. The UNHCR has repeatedly asked us to look at that and I strongly urge the Home Secretary to consider it.
Unfortunately, in direct competition with my proposals to try to encourage better due process for people in detention, the Government are proposing to remove people’s rights to apply for bail. That is a very retrograde step. I know that the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) has tabled amendments on this matter, and if he decides to press them to a vote I will certainly support them.
I have also tabled a raft of amendments on the best interests of children. The drafting of clause 14 appears to imply that certain children are somehow invisible, which goes completely contrary to the work I did in government as a Children’s Minister. It was with significant frustration that I read the wording used in the Bill, which, from my perspective, undermines the work we did to end child detention and put in place in the Home Office a practice of considering the best interests of children. More to the point, it runs contrary to existing law. At worst it is unlawful, at best it is deeply and profoundly confusing.
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We also seem to have a notion of the public interest that does not include children. We seem to have a narrow view of the public interest and to take a very right-wing perspective on it. I want to offer a slightly different view, which includes the best interests of children. I want to live in a society in which we are more sympathetic and in which we consider the rights of families as a matter of course and that is what my amendment 58 seeks to bring about.
Amendments 2 to 5 seek to try to correct the rather confused position in clause 14. If the Secretary of State must give her views about what is in the public interest, it must include children and must be in accordance with the UN convention on the rights of the child, which we have signed up to. Much of yesterday’s debate centred on the plight of children and it seems to me that such children in the UK would be aversely affected by the provisions in the Bill. An unaccompanied migrant who has been in the country for less than seven years will apparently be invisible to the Home Secretary as clause 14 is drafted. A settled child who came here at two, who has been here for less than seven years and who knows no other country is apparently also invisible to the Home Secretary.
When colleagues have pressed the Immigration Minister on such matters, he has sought to assure them that the courts are still bound by our duties under UNCRC and by the section 55 duty in the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 to ensure that welfare and safeguarding for children are provided for all children in the exercise of immigration functions. If that is the case, I wonder what the point is of tabling something that is confused and contradicts what the Immigration Minister claims will take primacy. As the Joint Committee on Human Rights has noticed, the most likely outcome is that front-line immigration officers will be unclear about the relationship between the section 55 duty and the test in the Bill.
We had a great deal of debate earlier about foreign national prisoners, but clause 14 applies to all article 8 claims and not just to the deportation of foreign national prisoners—