Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I suppose that one has to be content with small mercies. I have to thank the Minister for correcting me on the subject of regulations made under Section 41 of the British Nationality Act 1981. At least they are subject to negative resolution and we will have an opportunity to discuss them on the Floor of the House, which is better than I was thinking in the first instance: that it was being left to the discretion of the Secretary of State. The Government have been giving serious consideration to further measures following the sixth report of the Select Committee in another place on forced marriages. We are grateful for what it has done so far and I was glad to hear what the noble Lord said about the seriousness with which the Government take the question of forced marriages. It would be useful, however, to know whether the steps that they already took, which I recapitulated a little earlier, had begun to make any difference. I refer to raising the age from 18 to 21; the improvement of the current system for investigating allegations of the marriage route; and, particularly, ensuring that advice and information is available to sponsors, including awareness of the Forced Marriage Unit. The Select Committee promised that it would respond by December 2008. The noble Lord might have had some news on the matter, but if further measures are being contemplated that would reduce the number of forced marriages, I would be glad to hear about them. However, it does not prevent me insisting that the real solution to forced marriages is to have more thorough vetting of the applications and, in particular, of the knowledge of them by sponsors. I was flabbergasted to learn that because of the number of visa applications—they amounted to 40,000 in 2007—no regular interviewing of sponsors was carried out to find out whether they were genuine and intending to marry the person concerned. There has been considerable abuse of this route and there have been repeated assurances by Secretaries of State going back to Mr David Blunkett some years ago that there was to be a clampdown and all measures that could be taken to avoid forced marriages had been accomplished, yet every time we have a new Bill, fresh measures are announced. This is an important issue to which we probably have to return on Report. For the time being, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 59 withdrawn.