I rise to speak to my two new clauses. In so doing, I want to thank the Minister for telling me all the reasons why he does not support them, although he was generous enough to say that he agrees with the principles that lie behind them.
The second of my new clauses, new clause 12, could well be a blueprint for what happens after the country decides to leave the European Union in the forthcoming referendum, because it sets out the way in which people who are already in this country would be able to obtain the right of residence here, as well as some of the associated rules to ensure that those without the right of residence would be the subject of criminal sanctions.
Before coming to that in more detail, I want to refer to new clause 10 and some of the background to it. New clause 10 is modelled very much on a private Member’s Bill that I have brought forward on a couple of occasions for debate in the House, the Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill. The Bill had the privilege of being the subject of an opinion poll, which was conducted by the noble Lord Ashcroft in June 2013. The findings were that some 86% of those polled supported the provisions of the Bill and only 9% were against them, so this is a new clause that strikes a chord with the British people.
The reason I have brought those provisions forward again is that, despite previous debates, it seems that the statistics on how many people are being prosecuted and/or convicted for offences under section 24A of the Immigration Act 1971 are going in the wrong direction. In 2009, the number of people proceeded against and convicted both in the magistrates courts and the Crown courts for offences against that section was a giddy 158. For every year after 2009 the number had fallen, and by 2013—the last year for which figures are available—the number found guilty in the magistrates courts had fallen to six and the number convicted in the Crown courts had fallen to 66, making a total of 72 convictions for a widespread range of criminal offences against our immigration laws.
4.45 pm
This means that section 24A is in effect not being enforced. Meanwhile, clause 8 of this Bill will add a new section 24B, which introduces the offence of illegal working by people subject to immigration control. One wonders whether this offence, if enforced as rigorously as the more serious offences under section 24A, will actually achieve anything of substance. Perhaps it is more of a presentational issue so that the Government can show that they are doing something and attempt to win public support on that basis. I hope that there will be time for my right hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration to respond and to explain how many people
he thinks will be subject to prosecution under the new proposed section 24B for the offence of illegal working. I hope he will also explain why there have been so few prosecutions under the existing section 24A.
It is always much easier to go for the people with resources, the people who are trying their hardest to run businesses, often small businesses, which is why clause 9 penalises them for employing illegal workers, even though they are already to a certain extent subject to civil penalties. In 2013-14, there were 2,150 civil penalties for such offences. When it comes to the employment of illegal workers, particularly where the workers are themselves illegal immigrants, one would have thought that the first port of call would be to sanction the illegal immigrants rather than the people they duped into employing them.
Some offences are designed to deal with people who are in the United Kingdom with permission, but are subject to immigration control; and this in a sense reinforces my concern. If we are introducing new sanctions against those who are here lawfully but are subject to immigration control, surely we should be even harder on those who are here unlawfully and are trying to avoid any immigration control.
That is the background to new clause 10. It does not simply re-enact the provisions of section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971, as it includes more specific proposals that are set out in subsection (4), whereby:
“Any person who is convicted of an offence under subsection (1) shall be subject to a deportation order unless the Secretary of State deems such a deportation order to be against the public interest.”
Subsection (5) states:
“For the purposes of subsection (2) above, a deportation order shall be deemed to be in the public interest unless a certificate to the contrary has been submitted by the Secretary of State to the court.”
Another problem with the enforcement of our immigration laws is that too few people are being deported, because too few are being made the subject of deportation orders. One reason for that is the fact that a person who is prosecuted and whom the authorities seek to deport has a right of appeal against deportation, with all that that entails. The authorities often do not seek to deport people, preferring to allow them to—in a sense—lie low. There is, indeed, a perverse incentive for people to lie low in our system.
As we know, there are perhaps half a million illegal immigrants in the country at present. That is very much a ballpark figure, but it makes the number of prosecutions and convictions in 2013—72—seems paltry in the extreme. One is entitled to ask the Government, “Can we take you seriously when you are doing so little to deal with people who are here illegally, and thereby to deter others who may be tempted to come here illegally?” I think that we need to introduce a new offence of being in the United Kingdom without legal authority. The prosecution would then not need to prove how a person had come into the United Kingdom, because that person’s mere presence in the United Kingdom without legal authority would make him guilty of an offence.
There is another practical side to the matter. At present, if someone jumps out of the back of a lorry on a motorway, in a layby or at a service station, and members of the public are concerned and call the police, the invariable practice of the police is to say to the potential illegal migrant, “You should not be here; you must go
and report to the Home Office in Croydon.” They do not arrest them or initiate a prosecution because, I am told, they do not think that the powers of prosecution in the Immigration Act 1971 are adequate to ensure that it is worth their while. Rather than facing the hassle of arresting someone on, for example, the A31 in my constituency who has come in illegally through the port of Poole and has jumped out of the back of a lorry, and initiating a prosecution, the police tend to say, “You should not be here; be on your way; you should leave the country.”
I witnessed what was almost a similar situation on the island of Kos about a month ago. Members of our Border Force who were on secondment to Frontex were dealing with a large number of migrants who had crossed the water from Turkey, a distance of some 3.5 km. Those migrants were merely being processed. They were not being sent back to Turkey, and they were not being told that they were subject to any sanctions. All that they were being told was that they should not be in Greece, and should leave as soon as possible. That was a farcical situation. It was a waste of resources for our Border Force people to be involved in Frontex, with no powers to do anything about illegal migrants coming into the European Union and the Schengen area, when they would have been better employed protecting our own shores and borders. That is the background to new clause 10, and I hope the Government will start to prosecute more and take the offence of being here in the UK without legal authority much more seriously than seems to be the case at the moment.
We know that another reason people are attracted into the UK illegally is that we do not have any system of identity cards, so people think that once they have got here unlawfully they can lie low, sometimes for many years, and carry on below the radar while still being illegal migrants.
New clause 12 would repeal section 7 of the Immigration Act 1988, which effectively gives EU citizens who are not citizens of the UK rights equivalent to citizens of the UK in relation to residence in this country and goes to the heart of the issue of free movement of people across EU borders. I do not think there is any longer a case to be made for allowing EU citizens to have a special status compared with citizens from other parts of the world who may in our view have a greater entitlement to be in this country and whose presence in this country might be more conducive to the national interest.
This subject was discussed yesterday by the Scottish Affairs Committee when it met in Aberdeen and was examining the subject of post-study work visas. It became apparent that the extraordinary status of students from the EU was making it much more difficult for the fine Scottish universities to recruit people from foreign countries outside the EU, many of whom might make very good undergraduate or graduate students.
This is relevant to the whole issue of free movement of people, and I can understand why my right hon. Friend the Minister would not wish to anticipate the result of the forthcoming referendum and accept new clause 12, but I think this sets out the way in which we would be able to assure people who were already in the UK that they would be able to stay in the UK in the event of the people of the UK deciding to vote to leave the EU.
New clause 12(2) refers to the European Communities Act 1972. Without that subsection the new clause would be nugatory in the same way as the amendment debated in relation to women’s sanitary products and VAT was nugatory because it did not include the provision to exclude the provisions of the 1972 Act.
Subsection (3) states:
“The Secretary of State shall by regulations prescribe the content of application forms for registration certificates and for the grounds on which an application made may be granted or refused and arrangements for appeals and final adjudications.”
Subsection (4) sets out a timescale within which such a registration certificate scheme would become operative. The result of that would be that we knew who was in our country. It is a pretty basic question: who is in our country but not currently a United Kingdom citizen? The Government are in no position to answer it. By the use of registration certificates, we would be able to ensure that we were not burdening UK citizens with an identity card system and that those who are not UK citizens would be able to exercise their privilege of continuing to be in the UK only if they had a registration certificate showing that they had a right of residence in our country.
5 pm
There is no point in having a command without a sanction, so subsection (5) states:
“Any person present in the United Kingdom after 31st December 2016 without legal authority or without having applied on or before 31st December for a registration certificate…shall be guilty of an offence.”
Anybody who after that date enters or attempts to enter the United Kingdom without legal authority would also be guilty of an offence. The new clause then sets out the penalties that would apply and states:
“Any person who is convicted of an offence under subsections (5) and (6) shall be subject to a deportation order”
unless that is certified to be “against the public interest.”
That would significantly tighten up our immigration rules and would make life much easier for employers, particularly small employers. If the person was not able to establish that they were a British citizen when they were applying for work, the employer would be able to ask them to produce their registration certificate demonstrating a right of residence—and why not? We would also be able to ensure that people who were not entitled to be here were deported.
Another consequence of having new criminal offences as set out in new clauses 10 and 12 would be that people would often choose to leave voluntarily rather than face those criminal sanctions. I know the Minister is keen to ensure that as many people as possible who are not entitled to be here leave the United Kingdom voluntarily. These two new clauses would give them an extra incentive to go, because they would be able to avoid prosecution if they were to leave the UK—it is almost a type of plea bargain. The measures would reduce the administrative costs, too.
We cannot be complacent about the situation we are in at the moment. We have record levels of net migration, far in excess of what the Government pledged in the Conservative party manifesto. We have record numbers of people who are in our country illegally and of people in this country about whom we know nothing. We have a golden opportunity in this Bill to rectify some of
those lacunae in our law and to set out a framework within which we can operate in the future and thereby minimise the number of people who are in this country illegally and in breach of our immigration rules.