My Lords, I find myself once again in a minority of one in the Committee, but I am reassured that I am not in such a minority in the country as a whole.
The Bill and these amendments should be considered in a wider context. The removal of immigration offenders is central to the credibility of any immigration system. Furthermore, detention is an essential component of the removal process. Of course it is undesirable for people to spend long periods of time in detention, but in practice that is not the outcome of a majority of cases. The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, mentioned some statistics, but there are others from the same year, 2014. About 30,000 people were detained in that year, but 63% were detained for less than 28 days, of whom 37% were detained for less than seven days. Only 11% of those detained spent more than three months in detention and, of those, 62% were eventually removed from the UK, which suggests that those cases were among the more difficult ones and that detention was necessary to achieve removal.
Individual cases vary enormously. I do not think anyone would favour pregnant women being held in detention, but any specific time limit would be an invitation to those concerned and their lawyers to game the system. Let us not forget that 50% of all those who claim asylum in this country are in fact refused, and that includes those who have made an appeal and have lost it. That is the average over the past 10 years, so broadly speaking we are talking about a significant number of people who the immigration courts have decided no longer have the right to be in this country. Those are the people we are talking about here.
Those who attended the Second Reading debate will have heard the most eloquent intervention by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, in which he stressed the complexities of the issues and the fact that detention is permitted only where there is a reasonable prospect of removal. That is the case law and he set it out clearly, and it seems to me a reasonable approach to this issue.
There are of course other entirely different approaches to reducing the time spent in detention. One example is to have effective returns agreements with third countries and to combine those with dedicated resources for enforcement so that the entire process speeds up. Meanwhile, any significant reduction in the use or indeed the prospect of detention could only encourage people to stay on illegally in the hope, and even the expectation, that they could dodge removal. Finally, we cannot be blind to the extraordinary events that are taking place in southern Europe. This is surely not the time to weaken our capability to return economic migrants to their countries of origin.