My hon. Friend is absolutely right, particularly in stressing that the issue is not the people but the process: it is the process that does not work. An immigration detention estate is a manifestation of a completely failed process that fails the person coming to this country right from the start. We should not have an immigration detention estate; we should not have it at all. We only have it because of the accumulated errors of the Home Office going back well over a decade, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) said.
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As Members of Parliament who have been here for a while will know, we have had to deal with problem after problem with the immigration application process. Some
may remember back in 2013 the lost letters that were found in an immigration office in Croydon that went back to 2003. Many constituency MPs will have dealt with migrants who are on the sixth or seventh application for another reason, their right to remain in the country. We should not have to deal with all that. This is a failed process in the immigration system, and detention is essentially the worst aspect of that completely failed process.
As the United Kingdom seeks to establish its place as global Britain, it should be standing up for the highest principles of justice, and the highest principle of justice is how we look after the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. Those who come to this country looking to claim asylum include many who come from the most difficult of backgrounds. We should be looking to change the system completely and I will be interested to hear whether my hon. Friend the Minister can give any indication of how it might change so that we do not have a system that ends up with such a scar on our principles of justice as the immigration detention estate.
What we need is something that essentially says, “We’re going to invest the money—the £90 million-plus we spend on immigration detention—in a reformed system that actually tries to give the best advice to people, so we have the best counselling, the best legal advice and the best psychological therapy for people who come to this country right at the start of their claim, so that we can have a system that appraises asylum seekers in this country that is the best in the world in terms of the consideration it gives to the legitimate claims, but also has the expeditiousness in the appeals process so that the system cannot be undermined by those who would seek to undermine that honourable phrase of an asylum seeker by making bogus claim after bogus claim after bogus claim.” It is time that the Home Office brought this failed period to a close, which is why the amendments in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden for a 28-day time limit are so important.
As the Member of Parliament for North East Bedfordshire, with Yarl’s Wood in my constituency, I can attest to the human tragedies that have occurred in detention over the past decades. When I became a Member of Parliament in 2010, the last Labour Government were imprisoning children, and I am quite clear that the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on the Opposition Front Bench would find that unconscionable today. We have been making progress over the years, and a time limit on detention now is the next change that we should make. I say to the Minister that if he cannot reform the process—if he cannot today say he is going to reform that process—the time is up on what this Conservative Government are doing on detention.