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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

My Lords, I warmly support the amendment. We have discussed this matter a great many times and have all condemned the long periods of detention that people must suffer under the immigration rules and the lack of access to proper legal advice and assistance in applying for bail. It results in the extended periods of detention mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton. We do not even have proper statistics showing how long people have been held in custody. We receive merely immigration statistics showing how many people are in detention centres and for how long those people in the snapshot have been held. When we discussed this subject on the 2002 Act, we received far more from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam. We were provided with a vignette showing the number of people detained, for what period and how many were under 18. We asked at the time, ““If you can do this on the particular occasion of a Bill passing through the House, why can’t you do it on a regular basis and why can’t these statistics be published as part of the quarterly information from the Immigration and Nationality Directorate?”” It is a serious matter because, as the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, commented, some people commit suicide because of the length of time they have been in detention. I point out to the Minister that in her latest report on Harmondsworth, the Chief Inspector of Prisons mentioned suicide 19 times. That followed a case in 2004 where an inmate committed suicide. As the noble Baroness will probably recall, there were serious disturbances after that in Harmondsworth. But the lessons do not seem to have been learnt, because a few weeks ago there was another suicide in Harmondsworth followed the day after by an attempted suicide. Obviously part of the reason for these phenomena is that people feel hopeless and deserted and that they cannot gain proper access to outside help. The Home Office is considering a scheme to allow rota solicitors to go round the detention centres and to take instructions on bail. That goes part of the way towards what the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, seeks. If such a scheme gets under way, it will be extremely welcome and may help to relieve some of the enormous caseload with which BID constantly seeks to cope. As the Minister is probably aware, BID is a small charity which attempts to help people by putting them in touch with solicitors wherever possible and by finding sureties for them. If that can be dealt with on a more organised and thorough basis through the duty solicitors who will go into the detention centres, I should warmly welcome it. I am sure that BID would, too, as would all the thousands of people who suffer detention every year.