Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I am grateful to hon. Members for the tone in which the debate has been conducted. We have had a proportionate and balanced debate on some very important issues. However, as the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) said, we have yet to consider some perhaps even more serious issues on Report, and it is right to devote as much time as possible to those issues. With the permission of the House, I will seek to deal not with every point that has been made, but with the substance of hon. Members’ arguments and the assurances that they want. With that in mind, I hope that I can persuade the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins)—I know that he is a reasonable soul—that a vote on amendment No. 10 will not be needed. I genuinely believe that I can give him the assurance that he wants. The secondary legislation detailed in the Bill will achieve the effect of his amendment. I know that the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland indicated that he would support the hon. Member for Woking in such a vote, but if the hon. Member for Woking is in the mood for doing deals, I can say that I may well be minded to accept amendment No. 11, the other amendment that he described as important because it would put more flexibility in the Bill. The Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality and I are minded to say that the amendment is reasonable. Before I deal with the substance of the points that the hon. Gentleman made, let me turn to the matters raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz). My hon. Friend talked about additional burdens on the immigration and nationality directorate and asked whether the enforcement activity would impact on other work. He also talked about consultation with the ethnic minority community about the impact of the measures and discussed the IND’s ability to deal with overstayers. We are bringing forward the measures because the regime introduced by the Conservative party has failed to fulfil its intended function. In the nine years since that regime was introduced, some 17 prosecutions have been brought, but that is not to say that the IND has not carried out many more operations than that to detect illegal working and that it has not detected many more illegal workers than that during the course of its activity. The situation demonstrates the inadequacy of the current offence. The measures that we are introducing, especially the civil penalty scheme, will put a wider range of tools at the disposal of the IND, so it will not have to use such heavy-handed means to address the problem. The civil penalty scheme is a more measured and calibrated system through which the problem can be addressed without having to resort to criminal prosecutions in every instance. On my hon. Friend’s point about consultation, a draft code of practice has been published to set out the steps that employers can take to ensure that they keep within race discrimination legislation.