Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I think the Minister will have a very clear idea of the views of the Chamber on this amendment. The Second Reading debate on this activity requirement was also most interesting. I apologise to the Chamber for not having been here to speak at Second Reading. I am more sympathetic to what the Government are trying to achieve than most speakers today. It boils down to three central matters. First, there are those who oppose incentives for volunteering per se, and who feel that any kind of incentive obviates the very nature of the deed. I would call them the volunteering purists. The Minister must make clear in his reply that we are talking about an incentive, and not compulsion. Many noble Lords have talked about volunteering as if it were a compulsion or requirement. It would be helpful if the Minister could confirm my reading, which is that there is just an incentive to get you there slightly faster than if you did not volunteer. Secondly, there are those who believe, as my noble friend Lord Roberts does, that it is quite unfair for us to ask others to do what British people do not do themselves. My answer, as someone who has been on both sides of that fence, is very clear. Those who, through an accident of birth, end up with the privilege of British citizenship are indeed lucky. It is true that we do not question their ability to integrate. One of the reasons that we do not question that ability is because we suspect that—over a lifetime of living in certain communities, speaking a certain language and understanding certain cultural norms and mores—they probably imbibe some of the values of that society. Thirdly, the noble Lord, Lord Morris, spoke of social capital and trust. I have a lot of sympathy with much that he said, as long as what the Government aim to do is not seen as a means of affirming a certain patriotism, which I would also oppose. The Putnam report clearly shows that the more diverse a society is, the more trust seems to break down. This is a contested area, but no doubt the less we know about each other, the less we speak each other’s languages and the less we value each other’s values, the less we are able to trust each other. The building of networks that volunteering promotes is valuable social capital. However, British people do not have to go down that route and we are setting a higher bar for non-British people. I have said to the noble Lord, Lord West, under different circumstances and on other Bills about youth justice, that young people need to have more of an ethos anyway to do what is right by society and to understand the society in which they are living. Intergenerational issues could be much resolved if young people were to do a little more volunteering, frankly. I would like to see the expansion of this process to British people. The most serious point is that there are many who believe that the practicalities of this will be difficult to achieve and that we really have not thought it through. I am most sympathetic to those arguments. Incidentally, I do not agree that just because no other country does it Britain should not do it. Perhaps I am a radical liberal for that reason. It is quite interesting that there is good, serious thinking around some of the challenges of diversity that we face. We have become more diverse in the past 15 to 20 years than many other similarly sized European countries. I take pride in the fact that we are not responding with sledgehammers in the way that some of those other countries have responded, at least not in the challenges facing my community. It is good that we have been careful and thoughtful about what we have done there. Irrespective of how I feel about terrorism legislation, on the whole we have a good track record. Perhaps I can persuade the Minister, in all good will and in appreciating what the Government are trying to achieve on integration, to perhaps take away the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, and perhaps think about bringing back pilot schemes. I accept the difficulties of a pilot scheme in which there is no real incentive to give, but perhaps we could see how a couple of pilots work and then come back with another Bill containing a more carefully thought through and considered approach as to how we might achieve this objective.