Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

My Lords, I shall break my silence for the past half hour, although at this hour I shall be brief. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, for tabling the amendment. He always challenges the House on humanitarian issues by bringing forward amendments that make us reconsider previous positions that we have taken on policy, which is very important. He is very—I am trying to find a polite word—clever at finding ways of doing it that are within the correct rules of the Bill. The amendment is certainly well founded. To be picky, I find it difficult to know how the amendment might be properly applied. For example, if I were an independent medical practitioner and I were asked to certify that detention would not harm someone’s mental or physical health, I would wonder for how long into the future I would have to provide that certification. Normally, a medical practitioner would certify the condition of a person only at that moment. We do not know how long a person may be held in detention. As the noble Lord has said on many occasions, detention should not take place anyway; if it does, it should be as brief as possible. I see that the noble Lord wishes to rise. This is Report stage, so I shall be brief. That is the situation if I were being picky. I know that he is trying to raise the threshold of how we approach people in the vulnerable group. Vulnerable people who may be taken into detention—perhaps children or people who are vulnerable for other reasons—may be part of a family group. If one is a medical practitioner, one is then in the unenviable position of certifying the vulnerable person as someone who should not be subject to detention. What then happens to the remainder of the family group? Are they split up? I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, would say that none of them should be in detention. These are very difficult questions that any government would have to address. It is important that amendments like this give us the opportunity to consider the arguments put forward by the Bail for Immigration Detainees organisation, which is excellent in its briefing. The amendment also gives us the chance to ask the Government tonight to explain what the current condition is and what systems are in place to provide the protections that the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, asks for. It would then be up to individual Members of the House to decide whether they think that the Government have shown there is sufficient protection to make it possible for us to reject the noble Lord’s amendment or whether it needs to be considered further at Third Reading. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, is a master at refining amendments for Third Reading and I do not believe that the new rules on Third Reading will hold any fear for him at all.