Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

moved Amendment No. 8:"Page 21, line 37, leave out subsection (5) and insert—" ““(5A)   On an application made to him under this section, the Secretary of State may certify a person other than a constable or officer of Revenue and Customs as an authorised person. (5B)   The Secretary of State may not issue a certification of authorisation to a person as specified in subsection (5A) unless he is satisfied that the applicant— (a)   is a fit and proper person to perform the functions to be authorised; and (b)   has received training to such standard as the Secretary of State considers appropriate for the functions to be authorised.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, in this group of amendments we return to the question of who should be authorised to arrest, detain and search passengers arriving at United Kingdom ports of entry, or the juxtaposed control force at Calais and Dunkirk, which began operations on 1 March 2004, and in Brussels at the Gare du Midi, Paris, Lille and Calais Fréthun, for passengers on Eurostar, since early 2004. Your Lordships may recall that we expressed particular concern about the delegation of those powers to private contractors at the juxtaposed controls, in particular, where the person exercising the power will be a foreign citizen subject to foreign laws and to only intermittent oversight by the Chief Inspector of Prisons and the Children’s Commissioner. When the Chief Inspector of Prisons appeared before Sub-Committee F of your Lordships’ European Union Committee on 1 February, she said that she had just produced a report on the Calais arrangements. She did not know what others were envisaged, but she had the power to inspect Calais and had just done so. Will the noble Baroness confirm that the chief inspector and the Children’s Commissioner have the power to go into all the other juxtaposed control points that I have mentioned? The chief inspector went on to say that she did not believe that there were sufficient measures in place to take account of the special needs of children in terms of the decision to detain, the effect of detention or removal and what happens afterwards. She expressed the view that the Children’s Commissioner also had concerns about the treatment of children and what happens when they are removed. The chief inspector says that she is not satisfied with the arrangements for Calais and that she has not looked at them anywhere else. So I think that we were justified in raising those concerns both in Committee and on Report. We understand that the Children’s Commissioner has been to Calais and that he has been in touch with his French opposite number. Is the noble Baroness satisfied with the arrangements made for vetting staff to be employed by private contractors? Does she know whether there is an effective sex offenders register in France, such as will ensure that no person is employed in a capacity that will give him those powers? The Minister said:"““All persons will be checked for the existence of a criminal record in France. These records contain all charges or other issues around sex offences””.—[Official Report, 7/2/06; col. 577.]" We are not yet in a position to assess the merits of the French system of child protection, but there have been criticisms of some aspects of immigration detention at ports by the French from the Défenseure des Enfants. In particular, she criticised the treatment of children held at Roissy airport in January 2005 and, just last month, she received a letter from the Collectif de Soutien d’Urgence aux Réfugiés about the plight of unaccompanied children from abroad in Calais. Previously, we spoke about the controls at Calais, but there are other places in France where there are juxtaposed controls. In addition, we should not overlook the Gare du Midi, in Brussels, where completely different arrangements may be in place. We know nothing about whether there is a Children’s Commissioner in Belgium or whether there are arrangements for ensuring that people employed at the Gare du Midi are subject to sufficient controls as we would see them in England. The Minister said in her letter to me of 23 February that, since the control over who accesses the UK control zone in northern France is solely a matter for the UKIS, we would extend the right of access to the Children’s Commissioner. I repeat the question: do the Children’s Commissioner and the chief inspector have the same rights in the other control zones in France and Belgium? The Minister also said in her letter that the code of conduct applying to contractors’ staff with those powers would be the same as it is for detention custody officers, but that code was part of the operational policy standards and procedures, which are agreed between the contractor and the detention services, which,"““follow the principles of PACE but cannot be placed in the public domain for reasons of commercial confidentiality””." I want to challenge that statement; this is an additional reason why we are wary of the use of private contractors. We do not agree that commercial confidentiality should be used in that way. As long as those services are carried out by public servants, we know what code of conduct they must observe but, now that the operations are being privatised, the code is secret and we must rely on a general assurance about the principles on which it is based. The exemption of information provided in confidence to a public authority under Section 41 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is not absolute. It can be overridden under Section 2 if the public interest in disclosure outweighs the public interest in maintaining the exemption, as it manifestly does in this case. After all our debates in which concern has been expressed on all sides about the use of private contractors to arrest, search and detain people, including children of any age, whether accompanied or not, I cannot imagine a clearer case where the disclosure of information would be more essential if confidence in the proposals is to be sustained. I invite the Minister to reconsider the matter in that light, giving her notice that, if necessary, I will take the matter to the Information Commissioner. The fact is that neither Parliament nor the media nor NGOs will be able to scrutinise what happens in France or Belgium, and it is not likely that if there are irregularities members of the public will draw our attention to them, as often happens in this country. The magnitude of the powers being given to private contractors to deprive people of their liberty is being acknowledged by making the exercise of those powers subject to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, although it would be a resourceful complainant who discovered the existence of that right and managed to log a complaint during the short time for which he would be detained. As the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, commented in Grand Committee, those are powers more extensive than those that Parliament gave two uniformed community support officers under the Police Reform Act 2002, after what the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor described as a long and hard debate. This is too far. I beg to move.