Immigration (Leave to Enter and Remain) (Amendment) Order 2010

My Lords, this Government are committed both to strengthening the United Kingdom border and to facilitating the entry of legitimate passengers into the country. To help us to achieve this, the UK Border Agency has taken advantage of new technologies that secure and manage the UK border. One such technology is automated gates. This order facilitates the entry of automated gate users into the UK by amending the Immigration (Leave to Enter and Remain) Order 2000. Before I explain why the order is necessary, I will give noble Lords some information about automated gates, which are already in use at some UK airports. Automated gates speed the passage of legitimate travellers across the UK border by allowing permitted passengers to enter the UK lawfully without having to queue up at the manual immigration control. Automated gates work by verifying a person’s identity and making checks against Home Office systems to ensure that they are eligible to use the gates and enter the UK. If the person is eligible, the gates open and allow the person to enter the country. If the person is ineligible, the gates remain closed and the person is required to seek entry at the manual immigration control. Use of the gates is entirely voluntary. The order is necessary because the current method of granting leave to enter to non-visa nationals who use automated gates is inefficient and outdated. Non-visa national users of IRIS automated gates are currently granted leave via a paper notice printed by the gates. When the gates’ printers break down or run out of paper, the whole gate system is shut down and cannot be used by any passengers. Users also regularly forget to take their written notice from the gate, which then retracts the printout for security reasons, again taking the gates out of operation. The order provides a better and more efficient method of granting leave to non-visa national gate users. It will allow a UK Border Agency officer to authorise a person as someone who may obtain leave by using the automated gates following satisfactory screening. Thereafter, each time the person uses the gates to enter the UK, they will automatically be granted leave to enter for six months on the same basis as leave granted at the manual immigration control to non-visa nationals who seek entry as a visitor. In both cases, recourse to public funds and employment will be prohibited. The only difference is that gate users will not receive written evidence of their leave when they use the gate. In practice, the order will need to apply only to non-visa nationals, as the other types of traveller do not require leave to be granted when they seek entry into the UK. British citizens and EEA nationals do not require leave to enter the UK, visa nationals are granted leave in the form of a visa before they arrive in the UK, and foreign nationals who are settled in the UK already have limited or indefinite leave to remain in the UK. I trust that noble Lords will join me in supporting these provisions, which help us to deliver a safe and secure border while facilitating the entry of legitimate visitors into the country. It currently costs the UK Border Agency more than £2 billion to maintain our world-class immigration system. To fund this, we operate the policy that those who benefit directly from our immigration system should contribute towards the costs of running the system, so that we can balance this with the interests of the general UK taxpayer. This year’s fee review takes place against a difficult financial context for the UK Border Agency, public finances and the economy as a whole. The regulations we are debating today are made under Section 51 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 and in accordance with the powers granted in Section 42 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004, as amended by Section 20 of the UK Borders Act 2007. Under Section 42, the Secretary of State can set a fee for an application at a level that exceeds the administrative cost of determining the application. The way our legal powers are defined means that we must also specify fees in separate regulations under the powers in Section 51 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. Those regulations set the fees for applications, processes and services that are provided at or below the administrative cost of determining the application. These regulations were laid in Parliament on 10 February, are subject to the negative process and are not debated. However, I am happy to take questions on the fees covered by those regulations in this debate. This year, we have succeeded in limiting the extent of our general increases, by taking a more targeted approach to fees adjustment. We have also introduced some new chargeable services. The targeted increases include settlement visas. This better reflects the value of the product we offer and aligns the fee with the amounts paid by migrants coming to the United Kingdom under economic routes. We have increased the fee for long-term visit visas to reflect the value which these products represent to applicants. There is a £50 increase to the fee for tier 1 post-study route, which better aligns this fee with that paid by other applicants under tier 1. There is an above inflationary increase for all applications made at a public inquiry office to better reflect the benefits associated with these applications. New fees include a fee for all UK-based dependant applications to reflect the fact that each individual within any given application bears a processing cost to us as well as, sometimes, an independent set of entitlements for the individual. The majority of applicants are unaffected by this increase. There will be a new pilot service for premium biometric enrolment and caseworking. This is an optional service and will not affect any of the standard services on offer. A new dependant relative settlement fee, covering parents, grandparents and certain other relatives joining family members who are already settled in the UK, will reflect the excellent benefits to applicants, including the right to stay indefinitely in the UK and exemption from our English language requirements. It also better aligns this fee with the end-to-end fees paid by other migrants who settle in the United Kingdom. We maintain our strong belief that fee levels should be sensitive to wider policy intentions and that the United Kingdom must remain internationally competitive. However, we are unable to deliver the immigration system demanded by the public if we keep fees at current levels. Our overall aim is to ensure that fees make an appropriate contribution to the end-to-end costs of the immigration system. I believe that these fees are in the best interests of the United Kingdom. I commend both instruments to the House.