Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I should like to make a couple of points on the Minister’s very helpful speech. On the correspondence of the Constitution Committee, the noble Baroness said that the reply would be made as soon as possible. We need to know whether it will be available to this Committee in time to discuss it. The same applies to the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which the Minister said was on the point of being sent. We need to have that in front of us. Unless we have an official reaction from the Government to both important documents, we cannot decide properly the context in which the various amendments which have been discussed this afternoon should be seen. Obviously, we are grateful to the Minister for saying that she will look at Amendments Nos. 1, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 34. My only problem is that we have heard that before. I have lost count of the number of times the Minister in the other place, Mr Tony McNulty, said that he would look at issues that had been raised, and nothing emerged. Many of the undertakings given by Mr McNulty still remain to be fulfilled. I must acknowledge that the country of origin information unit has improved enormously. The Advisory Panel on Country Information is also a very useful government initiative. I have had recent contact with officials on these matters and I find they are very receptive. If you point out errors or omissions in the documents, which are all available on the Home Office website, they will look at those matters carefully. From my own experience, they do a far more thorough trawl of the independent literature which is available from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Commission on Human Rights than used to be the case. Even more importantly, they reference the documents so that you can go back to the originals if you want to see the context in which they were written. I congratulate the Home Office on the enormous improvements that have been made in this area of its work. My anxiety is that immigration judges do not look at the vast documents available to them. I had occasion to get out those on Nigeria and Ghana in connection with their recent addition to the safe list. Each was roughly 100 pages long. I am afraid that busy immigration judges and officials do not read the documents as carefully as they ought to, nor are they always as well evidenced in cases taken before immigration judges as one would like. That is a matter of mechanics; it is not the fault of the information policy unit or the advisory panel. My final word must be on the pictures. When Moses brought the tablets of law down to the Israelites, the Almighty did not offer to include any secondary legislation on them. They were fixed for all time, and I suggest that, with Moses looking down on us, that is a good pattern for us to follow.