We've ended child detention - so what comes next?

The coalition government is being credited with achieving its policy on ending the detention of children in its immigration estate by groups working with detainees across the country. 

The policy of child detention, rife under the days of the New Labour government, has seen around one thousand children detained in immigration removal centres around the country as members of families which were deemed eligible for expulsion from the UK by the authorities. It has been widely condemned by charities and agencies concerned with the welfare of children.

The coalition’s achievement is being widely acknowledged by groups such as The Children’s Society and BiD which together formed the OutCry! campaign which aimed to end child detention.

But there are still worries on the horizon about pilot projects being run in various parts of the country which are allegedly looking for alternatives to detention.  Leaks in the press have suggested that detention could be replaced by a policy of strict monitoring of families in line for removal to ensure that they are packed and ready to be moved to airports for flights abroad at anytime within a two week time frame.

The OutCry! campaign has set out its opposition to policies which focus solely on the end result of expulsion in a submission which went to the government at the beginning of July. This argued that improvements in the efficiency of procedures for dealing with family cases depended on “significant changes to the existing decision-making and case management system [being] made to ensure a more individualised, transparent and accountable approach.”  OutCry! believes that poor quality decision-making on matters concerning the eligibility of many families to refugee and humanitarian protection is the root cause of problems which express themselves further along the system as multiple legal challenges and non-cooperation with efforts to enforce removal.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the campaigners are right to take this viewpoint.  According to Home Office statistics for the year 2009, a total of 28% of the 15,350 appeals heard by the appellate authorities was upheld and either refugee status or humanitarian protection was granted to the person concerned.  By any standards this is an extraordinarily high rate, indicating substantial issues concerning the quality of decision-making in UKBA.

Yet even the high figure for successful immigration appeals probably understates the problem of poor decision-making.  Successful appeals depend on access to good quality legal advice and representation.  Law firms, barristers’ chambers and other agencies committed to providing high quality services report successful appeal rates much higher than the average figure – with Asylum Aid reporting a rate of 93% in all the cases it argued in the immigration courts in 2009 and Refugee and Migrant Justice credited within winning over 50% where it provided representation in 2008-9.

A report, The Refugee Roulette published earlier this year by the Immigration Advisory Service www.iasuk.org , pointed to major problems with the way immigration cases are funded by the Legal Services Commission.  IAS believes that obtaining reliable country of origin information (COI) is the critical element in arguing immigration appeals, and estimates that its legal advisors were funded to spend less than half the time they felt was necessary on COI research. Refugees represented by advisers less able than these expert agencies, or acting on their own behalf, are likely to be severely disadvantaged in an appeal system which places a high level of regard in COI.

 In the view of many organisations across the refugee sector the shortcomings of the asylum system is the main reason why so many people reach the stage where removal is imminent with a deep sense of injustice about the way their applications have been treated.  The problem for UKBA is that this is often shared by others who become privy to the facts of the case, producing the sort of community-level reaction which arrest and removal from local neighbourhoods is often intended to prevent.

The ending of child detention is a significant step forward and organisations working in the sector will want to applaud the coalition for meeting its commitments on this issue.  But the task of getting more justice into the asylum system remains squarely on the agenda.  The recent call by 28 organisations supporting the initiative of the Detention Forum is likely to be prove very timely in this regard and points the way to which further lobbying campaigns will have to take up these issues in the future.