My Lords, I will briefly intervene to support the speeches that have been made thus far in favour of these amendments. In doing so, I will return to something my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham said earlier on about the inappropriateness of our procedures. It seems that the cart and the horse have been confused here. Why did we bother asking Stephen Shaw to carry out his review and examine these procedures while we were steamrollering through legislation? Surely we should have waited for that review in the first place.
The terms of reference for the Shaw review were interesting in themselves. They were to “review the appropriateness” of the Government’s,
“policies and practices concerning the welfare of those who have been placed in detention, whether in an immigration removal centre or a short-term holding facility, and those being escorted in the UK”.
That goes to the very heart of this legislation. Surely it would have been wise to await the findings of that review before the other place considered this legislation, and before we in Committee were asked to look at 64 recommendations and consider which of those could
be incorporated in amendments, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said before.
Stephen Shaw called for a complete overhaul of the Rule 35 process, a supposed safeguard against the detention of victims of torture which—as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, implied in his remarks earlier on—he said is not working. That something as serious as people who have been subject to torture is now being addressed in amendments to legislation at this stage shows again the inappropriateness of the procedures we are using.
9.30 pm
Although Shaw does not explicitly endorse the parliamentary inquiry’s recommendation that a 28-day time limit should be introduced, he does argue that detention should be reduced,
“whether by better screening, more effective reviews, or formal time limit”.
It would clearly be helpful to our debate, at least at this late stage, if when the Minister comes to reply he would say which of those proposals—better screening, more effective reviews or a formal time limit—the Government are likely to support.
In recommendations 62 and 63 of his report, Shaw calls on the Home Office to consider ways of strengthening legal safeguards against excessive lengths of detention and for the Home Office to explore alternatives to detention. I wonder whether rather more light could be shed on that too. What does that mean? What could the alternatives to detention that Shaw had in mind be, and are the Government examining such things?
I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said earlier about pregnant women. Will the Minister tell us how many pregnant women are in detention centres at present? What is the average length of stay? How many women in the last year or last five years have given birth in our detention centres? Shaw makes clear that a fundamental change of culture is required, not simply legislation. How are we going to go about that?
Finally, will the Minister tell the House what examination has been made, as Shaw did, of experience elsewhere? Currently, there is no statutory maximum time limit on how long an individual can be held in immigration detention, but this makes the United Kingdom an outlier among EU member states, most of which are signatories to the European Union returns directive, which specifies a six-month time limit. Many member states operate a shorter time limit. For example, in France the time limit is 45 days, in Spain and Portugal it is 60 days, and in Belgium it is two months. In Ireland, which along with the UK is the only EU member state not signed up to the returns directive, the maximum time limit is 21 days. What account have we taken of experience overseas and why are we not signatories to the returns directive? Is that still on the agenda and, if not, why not?