Immigration Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-03
Topic: Immigration
David John Ramsbotham (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I am proud to be British and was both proud and privileged to serve for nearly 41 years in the British Army. But I have to admit that I am not proud of much of the thrust of this Bill, which seems to be based on the assumption that every would-be immigrant or asylum seeker is illegal, and should be treated as such. That is akin to regarding everyone awarded a prison sentence as being a combination of mass murderer, armed robber, rapist, arsonist and paedophile, and treating them accordingly. The vast majority of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers are legal, which should be the default thrust of any regulatory legislation On 12 July 1910, the then Home Secretary, the 36 year-old Winston Churchill, winding up a debate on prison estimates, said that the way in which any country treated crime and criminals was the true test of its civilisation. He could well have added immigrants and asylum seekers. On Monday night, I heard the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, read from his brief an assertion that: "The Government already have a raft of guidance and standards in place for ensuring that the regimes in detention centres operate at appropriate levels and in the interests of the welfare of detainees".—[Official Report, 1/1/16; col.1696.] In view of my experiences while inspecting them, I thought of Churchill and was completely flabbergasted. Has no one in the Home Office paid the slightest bit of attention to inspection report after inspection report, which point out that what the Minister described as, "a raft of guidance and standards", is not subject to any meaningful oversight? For "appropriate", he should have said "'wholly unsatisfactory". So stunned was I that I totally failed to ask the Minister what the word appropriate meant, and who in the Home Office was responsible and accountable for allegedly ensuring the operation of such regimes, and whether their reports could be made available to noble Lords That was bad enough. But Clause 34 is so far outside the rule of law, let alone what decent people regard as civilised, that I am ashamed to think that anyone British was responsible for the concept, let alone its inclusion in the Bill. I know that the Court of Appeal has ruled that the imposition under the Immigration Act 2014 of out-of-country appeals in deportation cases is legal, but such appellants have committed serious crimes and received substantial prison sentences before being deported. How can any Home Office Minister seriously bring forward so draconian a proposal for those whose presence in the United Kingdom is entirely legal knowing that, currently, 61% of immigration appeals are either allowed, remitted for the Home Office to retake its decision or acknowledged by the Home Office to be flawed before a hearing? This means that 61% of those whom Ministers intend to force to make their appeal from abroad will have legal grounds for compensation, which is bound to add up to more than the cost of continuing to do the decent and civilised thing Included in the 61%, as the Solicitor-General acknowledged to the Committee and the other place, is an appeal success rate of 42%, which the latest figures from the Asylum Support Tribunal show to have risen to 44%. On what grounds do the Government think their proposal to force legal, as well as illegal, potential appellants to leave the United Kingdom before appealing against such appalling and proven faulty decision-taking is justified, appropriate and civilised?