My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. Members of your Lordships’ Committee who are dedicatedly glued to their third Marshalled List of amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill will, I am sure, have noted that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb has attached her name to Amendments 71 and 72, both of which have been very ably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich. I have to say that I was extremely pleased to see the noble Lord in his place, as it did not fall to me to try to do that job.
That makes me reflect that we are missing two of the key people whose names are on these amendments—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. In our debates on the Bill, we have been discussing impact assessments and equality assessments a great deal. There is an extreme inequality in the way in which so many Members of your Lordships’ House have been excluded from amendments in which they clearly have a very strong interest by the ridiculous hour at which we are now debating.
However, in one way my noble friend Lady Jones and I are in our normal position, because my noble friend is a lark and I am an owl. Normally, we hand over around the late evening when my noble friend goes home and I pick up from her. The way we are going, we will be doing a morning handover for the first time, because my noble friend will be awake in about four hours, so perhaps we will hand over then.
I must admit that 1 am is probably not the ideal time to fully bone up on Hardial Singh principles, because my noble friend is much more of a specialist in this area of law than I am. So I was thinking about
how I could usefully add to this debate. From my understanding and from reading the Explanatory Notes, it seems to me that the key sentence is:
“If the Secretary of State does not consider that the examination, decision, removal or directions will be carried out, made or given within a reasonable period of time, the person may be detained for a further period”.
So the question I put to the Minister from looking at that is, how long do the Government really think this can go on for? We have incredibly overcrowded prisons with an increasing need for provision for old-age pensioners. Are we going to see the same thing in immigration detention? Is that really what the Government perceive as likely?
The other point that I want to make is a comparative one. If we look around other parts of Europe, we see that, already, even before the recent and planned extensions, we have one of the largest immigration detention suites in Europe. Why is that? France has a maximum of 32 days of immigration detention; in Germany, it is a sliding scale of six weeks, six months, or in extreme cases 18 months; in Hungary, it is six months. I know that the Government do not really like comparisons with Europe, but are we not putting ourselves as an utter global outlier through these provisions, unless they are changed along the lines of these amendments?