My Lords, I will speak very briefly to support the amendment. Seven years ago, I was a member of the inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees into detention. We called for time limits and had strong support across both Houses of Parliament, yet here we are, seven years later, still having to make the same arguments. Despite the Shaw reforms, there is still evidence of people who have survived traumatic experiences being detained and evidence of the damage it does to them and their health. There is evidence to suggest that the indefinite nature of detention contributes to mental ill health for the reasons that the noble Baroness has given—uncertainty, the lack of hope, and so forth.
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I really hope the Minister will not respond by saying that detention is not indefinite, because that is semantics. She is laughing; I am sure that is in her brief. The fact that people are released does not mean it is not indefinite—the lack of a clear time limit is the popular understanding of what “indefinite” means. There is no time limit, so people do not know how long they are going to be kept there, and my memory from that inquiry of when we talked to people who had been in detention was that it is worse than being in prison because you do not know when you are coming out.
The only other point I want to make—maybe this is not the time and maybe the Minister can write to us—is that I wonder where we have got to on community-based alternatives to detention. That was put forward as a possibility and I know there were pilots. Given that a high proportion of those detained are released back into the community, it seems to make a lot of sense to try and do it in the community as far as possible, as opposed to these terrible detention centres. But please do not say that detention is not indefinite because it is, in the way it is experienced.