Baroness Hamwee (LD)

My Lords, self-evidently I am not my noble friend Lady Ludford, but her name is on this amendment on behalf of these Benches. The noble Lord described immigration law as labyrinthine. It certainly is. There are easier subjects in which to practise. As a society, we are very lucky that a lot of lawyers are prepared to sacrifice themselves—I do not say this lightly—to ensure that people are advised about the labyrinthine rules. I am a member of the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House. At the moment, we are doing some work on the rule of law. I think we have raised with every witness the issue of access to justice. The committee is paying a lot of attention to that. I want to pick up the reference to the 30 minutes of advice that is available. It is not 30 minutes; it is less than that, as I discovered when I visited Yarl’s Wood a few years ago. It was explained that you have to take out of those 30 minutes the time needed to bring the detainee to the room where the lawyer is holding a surgery, for want of a better word. Can it really be advice? The first job of a lawyer in this situation is to listen. In pretty much every case, if you were to do it properly, I think it must take longer than 30 minutes to have a detainee explain what has happened and what his or her history is, and not just in one period, taken consecutively. For a number of people—those who have been subject to human trafficking and modern slavery have been mentioned—it takes a long time to be able to tell that story. So there is listening, and then there is advice—or, rather, an explanation and then advice, let alone action. We know that action does not happen. These Benches very much support the noble Lord’s amendment.