Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]

This has been a fascinating debate and, particularly given the revelations of my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), a moving and in some ways horrifying one. That causes some difficulties, in that I can either respond to the debate or address the Bill, which is what this debate is supposed to be about, because, to be honest, the two bear a slightly tangential relationship with each other. [Interruption.] As urged by the Minister from a sedentary position, I shall concentrate largely on the Bill, as that is what we are meant to be debating. Let me first take this opportunity to say that I hope that the Home Secretary finds life more peaceful and less turbulent out of the front line. Let me also assure her, in her absence, that I for one will be reading at least one part of her memoirs with particular interest. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) made a thoughtful contribution and was right about the necessity to debate immigration with the right tone. At times in this House and outside, that has not happened. It is incumbent on us all to give a lead in that respect. The Bill illustrates that we have a Government who, after 12 years of struggling—and largely failing—in immigration policy, are now just punch drunk when trying to deal with it. The House sees a new immigration Bill every year, but far too many of them, including this one, ignore the real issues and instead add to the confusion of those caught up in our immigration system. This was originally meant to be the year when we had the great reforming immigration Bill, replacing all legislation going back to the 1970s and simplifying it. Then Ministers published a draft Bill, with 13 parts and 214 clauses, which they said was part of the biggest shake-up of the immigration system for a decade. By the time we saw the Bill before us today, it had shrunk alarmingly, to four parts and 55 clauses. Being realistic, I should welcome that. Too much of the Government's legislation is usually damaging, so the less of it and the smaller their Bills are, the better. Despite that shrinkage, however, the Government have nevertheless still managed to include a fair amount of bad ideas in the Bill, which is why we welcome the improvements that were made to it in the other place. However, if I understood the relevant parts of the Home Secretary's speech correctly, it is particularly regrettable that it is still the Government's intention to remove many of the improvements that were made in the other place. Presumably that is what we will spend some of our time in Committee debating. If so, I should tell the Minister now that we will oppose him in those endeavours. I hope that other parties will do the same, because in many cases where the Government suffered defeat on the Bill in another place, it was because of cross-party efforts. I hope that we will continue that in this House. We have before us a rag-bag Bill that lacks any internal coherence, although some of it is useful. We have heard contributions from the hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) and my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire about clause 57 and the improvements in the treatment of children. We welcome that and, more importantly, we hope that it leads to a genuine change in how children are treated in the immigration system. Some of the Bill is therefore useful, but some of it is irrelevant and other parts are actively damaging. Let me go through the various parts of the Bill. Part 1 deals with functions at the border. The Government are clearly trying to reduce duplication of functions. We think that that is a useful step, but we think even more strongly that the Bill is a missed opportunity. The Government's failure to tackle Britain's porous borders has resulted in a disastrous rise in organised immigration crime. We cannot tackle crime in the UK effectively without addressing the problem of our porous borders. We believe that our borders can be better policed, preventing significant illegal immigration, as well as cracking down on the trafficking of people, weapons and drugs. That is why, as my hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary explained, an incoming Conservative Government would make the setting up of a national border police force one of our top priorities. The Bill could, if the Government were to co-operate, allow us to make a start on that. Experience has surely taught us in all parts of the House that the specialisation of police services is effective in fighting new types of crime. That is why we set up a committee under Lord Stevens, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who conducted a review of our border security arrangements and concluded that only a unified border force could protect our borders effectively. We intend to replace the current system, which lacks a fully comprehensive and joined-up strategy as well as adequate direction. The officers of the border force should have all the necessary powers and training to arrest, detain and prosecute offenders, as well as the ability to develop specialist skills in fighting people trafficking, illegal immigration and drug smuggling. Although part 1 has some useful features, it is a huge missed opportunity. Part 2 of the Bill concerns citizenship and naturalisation. I originally thought that the problem with this part of the Bill was that it was slightly irrelevant to the real and very complex issues affecting community cohesion and national identity. I freely agree that those issues are crucial, difficult and hugely complex. My original worry about the Bill was that it sent out a clear message that even if someone is here, working hard and contributing to society, the Government want to make it more difficult for them to stay here and become British. That seems to be the message behind the Bill, and I am genuinely not sure that it is one that the Minister really wants to send out. It might suit some short-term, dog-whistle politics, but it is certainly not the most thoughtful long-term strategy. The problem is that the Home Secretary complicated matters even more in her speech this afternoon, which I found completely extraordinary—[Interruption.] If the Whip would like to contribute to the debate, he is more than welcome to do so—[Interruption.] Okay. Well, if he is telling the Minister what to say, I feel for the Minister. Let me return to what the Home Secretary said earlier, because it was extraordinary in two ways. First, she said that she was proposing a new points-based system for citizenship, along with the points-based system for general immigration that the Government have introduced. It seems extraordinary—especially at a time when this place finds itself in more ill repute than it has done for a long time—when we are discussing a Bill that partly deals with citizenship, that the Minister responsible for the Bill should announce that a whole new citizenship policy is coming down the line and that she is proposing to introduce it for consultation within the next eight weeks. There is not a word about this new policy in the Bill that the House of Commons is discussing today and that the House of Lords has already spent weeks discussing. What kind of way to treat Parliament is that? The Home Office is quietly working away at a whole new policy relating specifically to a policy area in the Bill, yet it has not thought to share it with any of the parliamentarians who are debating the Bill. I think that Ministers should consider their behaviour very seriously. Even more extraordinary was the fact that, at one stage in what was not—let me be charitable—the most coherent explanation of a policy that I have ever heard, the Home Secretary said that she would cap the number of people granted citizenship each year. So she is proposing to introduce not only a new set of hurdles in the form of a new points-based system, but, on top of that, a cap. Like everyone else, I appreciate the irony that that sounds very similar to our proposals on general immigration, which she has always criticised and dismissed. She now appears to have adopted them wholesale in relation to citizenship. It seems very peculiar that a proposal as radical as this could be introduced in the middle of our deliberations on the Bill. It is not even as though we were promised the Bill in the next Session of Parliament. We have been promised another immigration Bill in the next Session, but it is supposed to be for simplification purposes. A radical change to the citizenship arrangements in this country is being introduced between two immigration Bills that the House is supposed to be debating, which is the most extraordinary way to proceed. But let us discuss the Bill before us. Two areas give rise to particular concern. One, which has been mentioned by Members on both sides of the House, is the offer of a quicker route to citizenship if voluntary activity is undertaken. That comes very close to compulsory volunteering, which is perhaps the ultimate absurdity. I share the fears of the Home Affairs Committee, which has produced a thoughtful report on the Bill:""There is a danger that the activity condition, if implemented without proper consideration, could cause a glut of poorly regulated 'volunteers'. This could place undue and unwanted pressure on the voluntary sector"." That is a genuine fear, and I hope that Ministers will listen to it. I hope that they will also listen to Volunteering England, which has asked a number of questions, the most pertinent of which is:""How will the Minister encourage organisations that feel that they do not have capacity to take more volunteers to open up new opportunities and spend time on the verification arrangements for the active citizenship scheme?"" We are in the throes of setting up yet more unnecessary new bureaucracy that will make life difficult, particularly for the small organisations in the volunteering field that often do very good and important work. The other unsatisfactory aspect of this part of the Bill—it has been much improved by their lordships—was the retrospective section relating to highly skilled migrants who are already here. That group has already won significant victories in the courts against the Government, and it would be sensible for Ministers to stop fighting a battle that they keep losing. In the Lords, my noble Friend Baroness Hanham succeeded in introducing an amendment, which now stands as clause 39 of the Bill. It ensures that people in the closing stages of their limited leave to remain do not get caught up by the new arrangements. That is only fair. Indeed, on 6 April, Mrs. Justice Cox found that there was""a substantive legitimate expectation that the terms on which you joined the Highly Skilled Migrants programme would be the terms on which you qualified for settlement."" That is as clear cut as it is possible to be, and I hope that the Government will now stop flogging this very dead horse. It is also worth considering the Government's desire to abolish the common travel area between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, as well as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The hon. Member for Belfast, South (Dr. McDonnell) is rightly concerned about that. The Government claim not to be doing this, but their assertion simply does not stand up to examination. There will be immigration controls on air and sea journeys where none exists at present. There will no longer be a common travel area. Will the Minister tell us what effect these new controls will have on staffing arrangements at the UKBA? New border controls will mean either a significant shift of resources from existing posts or the need for many more immigration officers. Which of these is going to happen? To make matters worse, the measures will not lead to an increase in security for the UK. There are, rightly, no proposals to change the arrangements along the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, so the effect will be to inconvenience travellers for no discernible purpose whatever. If Ministers argue that citizens in England, Scotland and Wales will be better protected by these measures, why are they discriminating against British citizens who live in Northern Ireland? The current arrangements work well and do not require changing. The removal of the Government's proposed change received widespread cross-party support in the Lords, and I urge Ministers not to seek to change the provision back. We will also be interested to hear Ministers' arguments about the change to the court arrangements proposed and rejected by their lordships. I think that we all want to achieve a system of immigration and asylum justice that is considerably faster than the current system, but that does not achieve speed purely at the expense of those who may have a legitimate claim to appeal. It was obvious that Ministers in the Lords could not convince their House of the merits of the Government's proposals, and I shall be interested to hear the Minister argue the case in this House. We shall obviously be raising a range of other issues in Committee. From whatever angle we look at this Bill—the eighth immigration Bill produced by the Government in their period of office—it fails to deal with the central problems produced by the long-term failure of immigration policy. It fiddles around the edges of a number of big issues, but it does not make our borders more secure or provide clear incentives for those in this country to integrate fully and properly, and it is not fair to many of those who have come here to work and to contribute to our economy. There is a need for big changes in our immigration system. We need changes to the points-based system to allow us to place a limit on the number of work permits issued, to bring about a properly integrated border police force and to strengthen the need to speak English for those intending to settle in this country, particularly through marriage. The Bill fails to address these important central issues. It will go the way of many of its predecessors—over-hyped on its introduction, then barely leaving a trace on the real world. We need properly radical immigration legislation, but to get that, we need a new Government. With every day that passes, it becomes increasingly clear just how much we need a new Government.