UK Borders Bill

I shall make more progress before I give way again. In clauses 1 to 4, we seek to provide additional powers to front-line immigration officers at border control, in order that they can do their job. At the border, for the first time, we propose that immigration officers should have the power to detain individuals who are the subject of an arrest warrant or who may be liable to arrest by a police constable. The Bill recognises that the role of the immigration officer is changing and is increasingly important in the wider battle for security. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) asked about some of the measures on oversight that will become important in the months to come. We will need to modernise some of the guidance that is provided for immigration officers, at present set out in chapters 31 and 38 of their instructions. We will also have to develop statutory rules for short-term holding facilities, including for holding rooms. All immigration detention facilities are subject to independent oversight by Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons. In addition, we have asked independent monitoring boards to set up mechanisms so that they may provide oversight too. Secondly, the Bill provides new powers to tackle the modern day slave trade—the people trafficking and human smuggling that may have cost up to 2,000 lives en route to Europe in the last decade alone. Through this Bill, foreign nationals helping people to enter the UK illegally, for whatever reason, will no longer be able to hide behind the fact that they perpetrated their crime abroad. They now stand to be arrested should they come to the UK or to be extradited from abroad to face prosecution here. We are also strengthening our prosecution powers to make it clear that facilitators or traffickers who are active in the secure areas of our ports can be arrested—for example, those who dispose of documents after arrival. The issue of smuggling and trafficking is fundamental to the future of immigration control and I am glad that, over the past few months, right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House have made that argument. It is a field of work that demands international solutions. In the IND review that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary launched last July, we committed to working jointly with European and international partners to tackle the challenges of global migration, including cross-border criminality. The Bill is, therefore, important in helping us to deliver some of those commitments because facilitation is often carried out by those involved in organised crime, including networks involved in smuggling other items, such as drugs, weapons or worse.