My Lords, as the Minister is aware, we have been concerned about the disgraceful conditions of the short-term holding facility at Heathrow Airport for some time. These facilities and others like them are not subject to any rules making provision for the health, safety, care, activities, discipline and control of the persons detained in them, unlike immigration removal centres, which have been subject to a set of rules of this kind since 2001.
The short-term holding facilities are defined in Section 147 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 as places,
“used solely for the detention of detained persons for a period of not more than seven days or for such other period as may be prescribed”.
These facilities are needed for persons either arriving in the UK whose status is being investigated by an immigration officer or being returned to their country of origin, having exhausted their rights of appeal. All 36 of them are managed by contractors on behalf of the Home Office. The main provider used to be G4S but that role has now been taken over by another private contractor, Tascor, highlighting the fact that the Home Office itself no longer has the expertise in-house to resume the management of operations that have been privatised and are no longer effective.
Since 2006, when the UN’s optional protocol to the UN convention against torture came into effect, we have been required to provide inspections by an independent expert body to routinely visit and report on all places of immigration detention to prevent the inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. This task is being performed both for immigration removal centres and for short-term holding facilities by the Chief Inspector of Prisons, whose remit extends well beyond that of the convention to detainee welfare, the need for a decent and respectful approach to detainees by staff and the physical conditions of detention. In the case of the IRCs, there are detailed rules governing such matters as welfare and privileges, religion, communications, healthcare, requests and complaints, and it has been the Government’s intention, ever since 1999, to publish an equivalent set of rules for short-term holding facilities. Drafts of the rules were published in 2006 and there was a consultation on them, but a final version was not presented to Parliament. In 2009, the same thing happened again: there was a draft followed by a consultation, but no sign of the finished product from that day to this. When inquiries were made of policy officials in the Home Office on my behalf, those officials said,
“the rules have been subject to various delays and as such have yet to be finalised”.
That was more or less the same as the answer the Minister gave when the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, asked him about when the rules would appear.
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In October 2010, the detention user group was told that a reason for the delay was that two of the five HMRC custody suites at Colnbrook and Gatwick would potentially be used to hold immigration detainees, and it was necessary to go through the draft rules to see which of them could or could not be applied to these suites. It was proposed to get the Minister’s agreement in principle the following month. Unfortunately, the detention stakeholder group was then disbanded by the UKBA early in 2011, and since then the DUG’s repeated requests for an update have been met with a wall of silence.
I expect my noble friend will agree that a delay of five years following two sets of consultations is unprecedented in the history of secondary legislation, and I wonder whether the reason for the delay is that at both Gatwick terminals the family room is not fit for purpose while at Heathrow the conditions under which children are being held are degrading and disgraceful, according to the independent monitoring board.
Taking all the STHFs at Heathrow together, I estimate that 17,400 people, including 1,300 children, were detained in the year ending 31 January 2014, an increase of 16% on the previous year, and a slight contrast with the figures given by the Minister in the previous debate when he was talking solely about children being detained in the IRCs. Unfortunately, none of the accommodation at the Heathrow terminals, Cayley House or the Cedars is residential, so detainees who are held overnight either have to sit up in hard chairs or be taken to Tinsley House near Gatwick and back again, a journey that can take the best part of two hours, depending on the time of day. The Cedars pre-departure family STHF near Heathrow is high-standard but little used, and I wonder whether it might be upgraded for overnight stays. I estimate that last year some 2,600 people were held at Heathrow for more than 12 hours, and it is profoundly unsatisfactory that we provide nowhere accessible where families can sleep.
Publication of the rules would expose the fact that the Immigration Control (Provisions of Facilities at Ports) Order does not require the provision of showers, family rooms or screened lavatories, and that airport authorities—Heathrow Airports Ltd in the case of Heathrow—have dragged their heels in providing the space for basic amenities. My noble friend now tells me that HAL’s budget for redevelopment of facilities at terminal 4 will be released on 1 April and that the best target date for completion of all the works recommended by the independent monitoring board is the end of the year.
My noble friend said that he could not let me have a copy of the plans because they were due to be revised, though I am aware that others have received copies, which presumably are only provisional. He also omitted to answer my question about whether the additional space needed for the expanded facilities had been secured. The Minister for Immigration visited Heathrow on 27 February, and I hope he was assured that the
area occupied by the port medical inspector would be freed because arrangements are being made for TB screening overseas, and this means that the PMI will move to terminal 3, releasing the space for the short-term detainees. I would be grateful if my noble friend would confirm this agreement, and if he would place a copy of the plans in the Library of your Lordships’ House.
The Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees is concerned that men and women are held together in STHFs; for example, at Pennine House near Manchester Airport. This is an issue which has been raised frequently by the chief inspector, and it may be another reason why the rules remain unpublished. AVID highlights three gaps in the protection regime arising from the absence of rules. There is no equivalent of rule 35, which applies in IRCs and is the mechanism which prohibits the detention of a person making a plausible claim to have been a victim of torture.
Rules 40 and 42, dealing with the removal from association and temporary confinement of a detainee, do not apply in the STHFs, and neither does rule 41 on the use of force, or rule 43 on special control and restraint. There is no statutory guidance on the provision of healthcare, on admissions and discharges, detainees’ property, welfare regime, clothing, food, hygiene and religion. There is no guidance on the role of the independent monitoring boards. Indeed, not all STHFs even have independent monitoring boards, Gatwick South being a glaring example.
The amendment is generous in allowing the Government yet another six months from the passing of the Bill to produce a set of rules which has been delayed for so long. I beg to move.