UK Borders Bill

I am conscious as I begin my remarks that I am in the presence of the hon. Members for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) and for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas), both of whom have had issues around the growth of the extremist and racist politics of the British National party. An unfortunate aspect of my election to Parliament on 5 May 2005 was that a candidate standing for ““National Front—Britons Not Refugees”” polled 931 votes in the Peterborough constituency. None of us here should have any truck with the racists and extremists of the right or give them any credibility. The Bill is a sort of reverse curate’s egg; it is generally quite good, but bad in parts. There are some aspects on which all Conservative Members could agree. We agree with the five-year plan established in 2005 that proposes a points-based scheme. I am delighted to see that the Government have adopted a Conservative policy, one which we expounded at the 2005 general election. I am disappointed in many respects, such as ID cards and the fact, as Conservative and Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesmen have said, that we do not have a consolidated Bill to consolidate all six previous Bills in the last nine years. We do not have an integrated borders agency, and the Minister did not make the case as to why that was. I agree with much that the hon. Member for Dagenham said, which brought back an experience I had a few months ago when I went out with regulatory authorities, including the police and trading standards, in the central ward of my constituency, which is approximately 70 per cent Kashmiri. I went into a restaurant and in the basement was a room full of about 14 bunks, as well as rosaries and candles. They belonged to people on the very margins of society; Polish immigrants who were being paid a pittance to be picked up in white vans and taken to pick vegetables in south Lincolnshire. Those exploited people are the by-products of a system that is not working and over which the Government have presided. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard), who is not in his place, said that there was an element of over-reaction to tabloid pressure in this Bill. It is reactive and hasty and driven by a media agenda, and essentially, it fails to protect our borders. Most importantly, it fails to meet the requirements of the Home Secretary’s undertakings, prior to the foreign prisoners debacle last May, that the system would be simplified, especially in the case of any new legislation. The Bill does not do anything permanently to rectify the systemic failures in the Home Office and ignores key challenges in existing legislation that will militate against the effectiveness of the Bill. I referred earlier to the Human Rights Act and to the European convention on human rights. I am afraid that I received an unsatisfactory reply from the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality who, uncharacteristically, made a partisan point about previous election campaigns. I was not talking about that; I was talking about the operation of the new Bill. The Bill is complicated and smacks of authoritarian gimmickry. We must look at the Bill in the context of the Government’s record. Forgive me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I will be partisan; it is a shambolic record that has delivered the foreign prisoners debacle. One hundred and twenty-nine of the original 1,023 identified by the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) in April last year have been deported, 79 of whom had committed serious offences. I have a personal interest in the issue. I have a category B prison in my constituency, HMP Peterborough. On 29 April, I asked a named-day written question to find out how many prisoners were released in the 12 months to 31 March 2006 from Peterborough prison. It was not a difficult question; it was not technical and would not require huge manpower or resources to find the answer. I got the answer eight months later after tackling the Prime Minister on 11 October at Prime Minister’s questions, making two points of order to the Speaker and tabling several more questions to Home Office Ministers. That is unacceptable. In pursuit of my proper business—holding the Executive to account on something straightforward—all I got was a blank wall and obfuscation from the Home Office about an issue of concern to my constituents. There is a postscript. We have now learnt that 55 prisoners were released and the Home Office is now refusing to tell me what they were convicted of because to do so would incur disproportionate cost. Again, that is unacceptable. I do not blame the Under-Secretary, but I will be in correspondence with her colleagues on the issue. The specialist team that was set up to track down these foreign prisoners closed down last June for no reason. In the media, if not necessarily in this House, the Home Secretary said that those prisoners from outside the EU should be bribed with £2,500 of public money—money that my hardworking families in Peterborough have contributed to the Exchequer—to go home. What sort of system is that? The cost of the IND to the Exchequer went from £300 million in 1999 to £1.9 billion in 2004 and it is still projected that, within the next two fiscal years, the figure will be £1.5 billion. It is a good thing that staff there are not getting performance-related pay, as it has been a shambles and a disaster. Since 1997 about 375,000 asylum seekers have entered the United Kingdom. We have confirmation that only 85,000 have left. Those figures are from the Home Office. Even as recently as the third quarter of last year, we learned that the number of removals of asylum seekers had dropped by 28 per cent. Despite the Government’s rhetoric, the macho posturing of the Home Secretary and his undertaking to deal with the issue and to get tough—he said that he stands shoulder to shoulder with the people—that did not happen. Unfortunately, like many of the Prime Minister’s promises, that promise was broken. Between 430,000 and 870,000 illegal immigrants—the Government do not know the number—have settled in the United Kingdom in the past eight years. That brings me to the point that I raised in an intervention with respect to EU migrants. I accept that that is not strictly covered by the Bill, but such wrong-headedness, a projection that was so way out, does not inspire one with confidence in Home Office projections. There has been a particularly negative effect on community cohesion issues in my constituency, not necessarily affecting white Anglo-Saxon Protestant residents, but affecting the established Kashmiri-Pakistani community which has been in Peterborough since the 1960s and 1970s. I am proud to be the Member of Parliament for a diverse constituency where we speak 93 languages and get on extremely well. Two years ago one of our councillors from Kashmir had the honour to be the city mayor. The fact that he was a Conservative was a bonus. The Central ward is represented by three Pakistani Conservative councillors. The reason I feel passionate about these matters is that I do not want to give an opening to the racists to foment trouble. The United Kingdom Independence party is in many respects on the fringes of that debate. It is the respectable side of the British National party. Intolerable stress has been placed on housing, with families of 14 or 16 living in a small terraced house. Unscrupulous landlords have been buying up almost entire streets in an established area in the city centre. Primary care services have been under massive pressure, and we have had huge problems at our local primary schools with children whose first language is not English. We have not had the funding to deal with those issues and reassure people that migration is controlled and that they need not worry about people with different languages and cultures. That is the problem. I am conscious that others want to speak, so I shall end with my two specific concerns about the Bill. Clauses 28 to 35 deal with deportation. I made the point to the Minister earlier about the Human Rights Act 1998, but he dismissed it. The cliché about the elephant in the room seems appropriate. If we do not consider the interpretation and the ramifications of the Human Rights Act and realise that it will be used, or abused, by those who should not use it, we will not reach the objectives of the Bill in respect of deportation. I understand that the provision derives from the Chahal decision of 1996 and the European convention on human rights, but it is foolish to include in the Bill clauses that solidify a legalistic loophole. That will lead to obfuscation, delay and frustration in the system. Even if the Bill becomes law, the powers will be too lax. I referred earlier to the operational enforcement manual, which concedes that judges can only be advised in respect of determination—it is not part of law at present. That is a mistake. There are 9,651 foreign prisoners in UK prisons, up from 4,677 in 1997. Against that background and the problems that we will have dealing with them in future, I asked the Minister some specific questions, which I hope the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Enfield, North (Joan Ryan), will be able to answer. Why do we still not collect statistics on those who have been recommended for deportation order and those who are actually deported? That, as far as I know, is the current situation. Members of Parliament are regularly told that that information is not collected centrally. Why is the court in effect required to subordinate the national interest to so-called human rights? Why is there not an automatic presumption in favour of deportation following serious criminal behaviour? People are not sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment or more for not paying their TV licence. Violence, sexual offences and drug offences come to mind in relation to such a sentence. Why are central records not kept on the immigration status of all those in the prison estate who have been convicted? I do not see the point of another Bill if previous Acts are not adhered to. Why is the Home Secretary not able to use the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 to deport criminals? The Act allows the Government to do so. The second issue of concern is biometric immigration documents. In a good intervention, the hon. Member for Walthamstow sought reassurance, as do I. The measure smacks of sleight of hand with regard to ID cards—function creep, one might call it. It seeks to embed the concept of ID cards, which may be voluntary in a few years, in the public psyche, using immigration control and the so-called war against terror as the rationale for so doing. It is not right for the House to accept that rationale and the construction of an ID database under that cover. If the raison d’être of the proposal and the clauses is to deal with illegal working, why have the Government not made more use of the relevant existing legislation—the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996? Finally, the Bill contains much that I would support if it were enacted, but there is a long way to go to repair the damage done to the security of the country by the Government’s open-door immigration policy over the past 10 years. The Bill is 10 years too late. The public, sadly, do not believe a word the Government say about immigration. That is a testament to the culture of spin and obfuscation. It all began back in 1997 with the decision to rescind the bilateral agreement with France. That was followed by Sangatte and the green light, and the process has continued ever since. I hope the Bill will go some way towards ameliorating the calamitous series of policy failures, but only a Conservative Government will have the political will and the nous to protect our borders and our people.