UK Borders Bill

I welcome a number of items in the Bill. When the Bill was published, the Minister laid out in a press statement a number of additional proposed powers for immigration officers: to arrest people smugglers or traffickers, which is to be welcomed; to detain at ports those whom they suspect of having committed a crime; and to arrest those believed to have been fraudulently acquiring asylum support, which is also to be welcomed. The Minister also said that there should be access to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs data to track down illegal immigrants. I have a brief question about that. I can certainly see the appeal of accessing HMRC data. I wonder, however, whether there is not an issue about the use of such data, in conjunction with all the other biometric and non-biometric data held on the central database, for a purpose that was not provided for. I am sure that the issue will be subject to detailed scrutiny at a later stage. I certainly hope that it will be. However, I come back to the guts of the issue. I was surprised, as were many journalists, that the powers proposed were not already in place. It seemed extraordinary that immigration officers did not have the power to arrest people smugglers or even to detain those whom they believed may have committed a crime. It was even more extraordinary given that since Labour came to power in 1997 there have been immigration Acts plus various crime Acts and terrorism Acts almost every year—the Special Immigration Appeals Commission Act 1997, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and the measures taken in 2004 and 2006. The problems of illegal immigration and, in particular, people trafficking are not new. In June 2000, following the deaths of 58 people in the back of a refrigerated wagon, the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), said that discussions were ongoing about improving port security. In January 2002, another Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), announced that the maximum jail sentence for people traffickers would increase to 14 years. In 2002, during the Sangatte crisis, the Prime Minister said that Navy ships would intercept people traffickers, as long as they were not in the channel tunnel, when we would need submarines. He did not actually say that last bit. By 2003, the BBC reported that a senior Metropolitan police officer had warned of a growing threat, and by April last year, the Prime Minister announced that Serious Organised Crime Agency law enforcement officers would target people traffickers. After all that—and such things were happening almost daily—we found that the powers to detain and arrest did not exist. I welcome those powers. However, the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) mentioned an anomaly, which the Law Society of Scotland has laid out clearly. It asked why, notwithstanding the non-application of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 in Scotland, immigration officers should not have the power of detention. It went on to ask why clause 21, which relates to the forfeiture of detained property, applies only to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I do not support unified or uniform legislation for the sake of it; I would prefer that the entire immigration and border control regime were devolved to Scotland. However, in this instance, when we are taking border security extremely seriously, there is a real question.