Senior Tories fail in bid to force government to introduce a 28-day maximum for immigration detention

Senior Tories have failed in their bid to try to force the government to end indefinite detention for those held in UK immigration centres.

Former cabinet minister David Davis had warned the current law flies in the face of British justice.

Victims of human trafficking, torture, rape, forced prostitution and modern slavery are being locked up rather than helped when they arrive in the UK, he said.

He and other senior Tories, including another former cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell, backed an amendment calling for a 28-day limit on detention to the government’s immigration bill.

Mr Davis told the Commons the UK was the only country in Europe without a limit on the amount of time people can be held.

At the end of last year one person had been held for 1,002 days, he said.

“These people are detained without trial or due process, without oversight and without basic freedoms, and they’re carrying the debilitating psychological burden of having no idea when they will be released.

“This flies in the face of centuries of British justice,” he said.

He also hit out at a government briefing note which said that 97 per cent of people in immigration holding centres are foreign national offenders.

Mr Davis said that was currently “technically true” but only because many people had been moved out of the centres as the coronavirus crisis hit.

But his amendment was defeated by 252 votes to 332, a majority of 80.

Other amendments designed to continue existing arrangements for unaccompanied child refugees to be reunited with close relatives in the UK, and delay the application of the rules on no recourse to public funds during the coronavirus crisis, were also defeated.

MPs approved the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill at third reading by 342 votes to 248, a majority of 94.