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Alternatives to Child Detention

I am grateful for that clarification. The position was not entirely clear. The point was rightly made about access to local authority services. Local authority social services are embedded at Yarl's Wood; they are there permanently. My final point about the statistics is that the figure was more than 1,000 and it is now five, so we are doing our best, even in the interim phase while the review is going on, to keep the numbers to an absolute minimum. Various Members on both sides of the Chamber brought up the issue of delays, which lead to problems in the system. I think that I was being invited by the right hon. Gentleman to give a new time scale for the end of the legacy. Given all his experience, he will excuse me from making such commitments in my second outing at the Dispatch Box, but he will know, from having sat through many of these debates with me in the past four years, that like him, I have been very exercised by the problem of delay. I dare say that those who were Ministers in the previous Government would not dissent from the basic proposition that the long delays embedded in the system lead to many of the associated problems that we see. Bearing down on those delays and getting rid of the old legacy, as it has been called, as fast as possible is clearly a high priority. That will have beneficial spin-offs throughout the asylum system and, indeed, the wider immigration system. At various stages, the debate drifted into a general immigration debate, and it is perfectly reasonable that the same points apply in that context. The fewer delays we have, the more likely we are to avoid the problems that we have seen, although it is a fair point—it was made by Ministers in the previous Government and will be made by me—that not every delay in the system is caused by the system. Not every delay is caused by the border agency. Some delay is caused by the legal processes that people have the right to go through and do go through.