UK Borders Bill

I am grateful to all those who have taken part in the debate on this amendment, particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, with his experience on the JCHR, for explaining why the JCHR recommended that the PACE code of conduct should be adopted. I wish that it had been possible for us to scrutinise the comprehensive standard operating procedures which the Minister said have been published today so that we could have seen to what extent they matched up with the PACE code of conduct and whether the exclusions simply catered for the fact that, as Ministers told the JCHR, there was no investigation procedure in this instance. The Minister should recognise that the JCHR considered the point which he again made today—that immigration officers’ existing powers to detain, search and seize for immigration purposes were not subject to the code of practice. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, emphasised that the JCHR stated that the immigration officers who exercised their powers under this Bill would do so in connection with criminal offences and not with immigration offences, and that that role appeared to be in the nature of a general policing function and was therefore appropriate to the PACE code of practice. The Minister did not deal with that point. It is a pity that we did not also have in front of us the Government’s response to the JCHR report, which I take it that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, would have mentioned if it had been available. The amount of time that has elapsed between 14 May and 2 July is not excessive in terms of the time that Governments normally take to respond to JCHR recommendations, although it would have been useful to have their response to the report in time for us to look at it in Grand Committee. I was encouraged by what the Minister said about the transfer of some provisions of the PACE code of conduct into the comprehensive standard operating procedures. He said that immigration officers would have to inform the detainee of the reasons for their detention, that there would have to be a record of the detention and that there would have to be access to a telephone and so on. Since the noble Lord, Lord Judd, the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, and I are at one in suggesting that documents which bear on the proceedings of the Grand Committee should be available in the Room and not at the Printed Paper Office, the Minister should take up the matter through the usual channels, perhaps with the Procedure Committee, to make sure that on future occasions when a Minister refers to a document that is immediately germane to the proceedings under consideration, that document is available on the spot and not just in the Printed Paper Office. I was also encouraged to hear what the Minister said about the chief inspector of the BIA and his role, but he slightly marred the point when he said that a decision had yet to be made on whether the chief inspector would be empowered to report on the detention procedures, which is the whole point. If the chief inspector was excluded from looking at one aspect of the BIA’s functions, that would be an unnecessary limitation on his powers and would mean that he did not have a role that corresponded with that of other chief inspectors such as the Chief Inspector of Prisons, who has no limitations on her role.