UK Borders Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness. It is the practice not to send highly controversial Bills into Grand Committee. We did protest about this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, will recall, in the case of the 2006 Act. At the beginning of the proceedings in Grand Committee there, we said quite firmly that we did not like the idea of having controversial immigration legislation dealt with in Grand Committee. While the Government may have told my noble friend Lord Shutt about this, I certainly was not aware of it. However, the general views of the team which deals with Home Office affairs from this Front Bench were made perfectly clear a year ago, so the Government should have been aware of them.