Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, I agree that it is a very interesting idea. It comes from a noble Lord who is full of interesting ideas, as I know from being a fellow member of a Select Committee where he often makes significant contributions. For many years I had a second passport: I used one to enter Israel—for instance, when I was there in 1976 to hear President Sadat addressing the Knesset, which was quite an historic occasion—and the other I used for neighbouring Arab countries where an Israeli stamp on the passport could have meant refusal of admission. There may be legitimate reasons why people have more than one passport. Since the UK does not object to dual nationality, there is no reason why a person who acquires British citizenship should not retain both the citizenship and the passport of his previous nationality. The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, is seeking an additional requirement that a person would have to satisfy in order to be naturalised as a British citizen. He would have to declare whether he holds a passport of another nationality and, if so, which one; and, if, once he has been granted British nationality, he subsequently obtains the passport of another state, he should declare that as well. This sounds very reasonable. In other countries, there are records of departures as well as arrivals. We know that the intention is to extend our own records to include departures as well as arrivals. It would be convenient to be able to match the records where a person used different passports for arrival and departure. There may be another reason for wanting to compare the records of particular individuals. For example, if a person is a criminal suspect it may become important to trace his movements in or out of the country. That would make it not only desirable but perhaps essential to know which passports he was using. As far as I am aware, the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, is the originator of the proposal in this amendment and it has yet to be canvassed or discussed outside Parliament. Although one can see that it would facilitate the detection of cross-boundary criminal or terrorist activity, I respectfully suggest to the noble Lord that he finds a way of consulting more widely or of pressing the Government to do so, rather than asking for the clause to be prematurely inserted in this Bill. I do not disagree at all with him with regard to the sense in which he has raised this but, before we finally agree to it, there should be wider consultation, for example with civil liberties organisations, to check that we are not doing something that we would regret later on. I hope that the Government will adopt this proposal, have their own consultation and come back to the House with definite proposals based on them.