UK Borders Bill

The Minister will realise from the tone of the interventions—not so much from the Benches behind me, but from those behind him—the enormous degree of scepticism with which the Bill is being greeted by the House. He cannot be surprised. We should put the Bill in its proper perspective. I will start with the legislative perspective. This is the sixth immigration Bill that the Government have introduced in less than ten years, and these Bills are coming along faster and faster. Last year we had an immigration Bill; this year, we have an immigration Bill; I understand that, next year, the Home Office hopes for an immigration consolidation Bill. If passing laws made our borders more secure, we would have the safest and most efficient immigration system in the world. Instead we have an embarrassing shambles. The Home Secretary was of course right to describe the system as ““not fit for purpose”” in that notorious phrase that perfectly encapsulates the new Labour Home Office; a phrase that was correct when he said it and is even more correct today, when he has had nearly a year to make things better. The problem, as illustrated by the Bill, is that for this Government, passing a new law is displacement activity. They do it because it is easier than getting to grips with the real problems. They do it because it gives Ministers a sense of usefulness, purpose and forward momentum, a sense that they might well lose if they stopped to contemplate the reality of Britain’s immigration and asylum system today. Let us look at the reality. The second perspective in which the Bill needs to be seen is the impact of all the Bills passed by the Government on the real world. Let us consider the current efficiency of the Home Office and its immigration system. Let us look at what has happened in the past few months: the Harmondsworth riot; owing to rioting by inmates, 150 immigration detainees were bailed or freed from the immigration estate; the statement by the head of removals at the IND that he did not have ““the faintest idea”” how many people were currently living in the UK illegally; the admission by the Home Secretary that there are as many as 450,000 failed asylum seekers resident in the UK; the accusations of corruption at Lunar house at the IND’s office, where senior workers were demanding sex from an 18-year-old girl in return for granting asylum; the discovery, also at Lunar house, that a member of an extremist Islamist group was working there unchecked by the Home Office; and perhaps most notorious of all, the fact that the Home Office itself was employing illegal workers. The Home Office always faces difficulties, but this is unarguably the worst record of failure in its entire history, and my remarks have covered only the immigration area of the Home Office. We need to measure the Bill against the scale of the current crisis. The Bill contains some measures that might be useful, some that might be damaging and some that will have no practical effect whatsoever. It has, as I think the Minister would admit in his private moments, no central purpose or theme. It is a rag-bag of largely unconnected measures.