UK Borders Bill

I am sure that the whole House will be grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving a dose of realism to his party’s Front Benchers, who sometimes appear to live in a parallel universe. The Minister will already have heard protests, not least from the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard), about the difficulties that his proposals will cause to the training and oversight of immigration officers. They will be given extra powers, but it is not obvious that there will be any new guidelines for them to meet, or that they will be given any extra training. Those problems have been identified by Liberty and the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. If the Minister followed the almost universal advice to bring the various bodies together under a border police force, they would be given the appropriate training and oversight that we apply to our police. That in itself would reassure those—clearly represented in the House—who feel that the proposals give too much power to immigration officers. As for the part of the Bill that deals with biometric registration, we have no objection to the use of biometric tools for specific purposes and when individuals have control over the management of their identity, but the Government are introducing new laws that breach both those principles and therefore become an unacceptable intrusion into the privacy of the individual. The main example is of course the national identity register, but the regulations proposed in the Bill have some of the same dangerous characteristics. The danger is compounded by the vague nature of the proposals. Almost everything is left to secondary legislation, so it is impossible to know at this stage how all-embracing the controls will be. What is clear is that the questions arising from this part of the Bill are extremely serious. How much will the compulsory document cost, what non-biometric details will be required, and how will foreign nationals who are already here legally register for a card? Perhaps most important of all, how will the information be kept secure? Ministers constantly assert that once biometrics are in use, everything will be secure, 100 per cent. accurate and 100 per cent. safe. The Minister will know that people have conducted tests that simply give the lie to that assertion. As The Guardian reported on 17 November last year, an expert from Cambridge university successfully and easily extracted data from a biometric passport with an inexpensive reader, to prove just how open to fraud they are. He commented:"““What concerns me is that this demonstrates bad design on the part of the Home Office, and we know that government IT projects have a habit of going terribly wrong. There is a lack of security in what we can see””." On top of that is the question that lies at the heart of our objections to the national identity register: who will have access to the information stored on the biometric visas? Clause 8 is instructive, saying that the regulations"““may include provision permitting the use of information for specified purposes which do not relate to immigration.””" What exactly does that mean—access to benefits, health care, employment or education? Among the first people to be affected by that new requirement will be those 3.9 million people who have lived in this country, in many cases to our benefit and to their benefit, for many years. They are entitled to know exactly how intrusive the Government are planning to be. I hope that Ministers will also deal with the point made about that matter by Liberty, which cannot see how the creation of a biometric registration document is an effective method of dealing with the people who are living in this country without the right of residence or work. The Minister is aware that employers already face legal obligations under the Asylum and Immigration Act, which has been mentioned, and that they are obliged to make document checks. Liberty says that it is"““not aware that there is a significant problem with employers being deceived by fraudulent employees with fake documents.””" It says, and it is right, that it would be helpful if the Government were to clarify whether there is such a big problem. Liberty says:"““We suspect the real problem of illegal working lies not in the deceiving of honest employers but in the intentional employment of those without immigration status by unscrupulous and exploitative employers.””" I am sure that at some stage in the passage of the Bill—[Interruption.] The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Enfield, North (Joan Ryan), is shaking her head. If she is saying that there are no exploitative employers who deliberately employ illegal labour, I am interested and I will leave her to explain that to Labour Members. That is probably not true. There is clearly some of the first and some of the second, but in my experience there is more of the second than the first. I am surprised that the Government appear to be rejecting that.