UK Borders Bill

And Uganda, as the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, rightly reminds me—make it likely that people from those countries will try to come here. The thinking seems to be that if every legal Somali had a BID, it would be easier to identify those who have arrived here illegally. Is that kind of discrimination justified, in the Government’s opinion? If it is, we do not want them to have the unrestricted power conferred by this paragraph to single out classes of persons as guinea pigs for the biometrics proposed in the Bill. One way in which to ensure that the queue of people lining up for the BIDs was not arranged in a discriminatory way would be to appoint an independent person, not necessarily from the Liberal Democrat Benches, to act as a monitor of the introduction of biometrics and to report to Parliament from time to time on the compliance with discrimination legislation, the Data Protection Act and any other matters to which Clauses 5 to 15 refer. I do not expect the Minister to give me an off-the-cuff reply to that suggestion, but I would like him to mull it over and to say in due course whether he thinks that it is possible. I am sure that the whole of the Grand Committee would want to avoid any suspicion of discrimination in the way in which the roll-out is managed—suspicion that would lessen confidence in the whole procedure. Therefore, in due course, I will invite the Minister to come back with an answer to my, I hope modest, proposal that we have an independent monitor of the roll-out and other matters in Clause 5.