UK Borders Bill

I wonder what we shall do on wet Monday afternoons for the rest of the summer when we no longer have the UK Borders Bill to keep us happy and occupied. I remind the Committee that on the first day in Grand Committee we discussed assault, why it was necessary to have a separate offence of assaulting an immigration officer and whether this clause would come into force at the same time as Section 281 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The Minister said in response to that amendment that the penalty of 51 weeks would indeed apply from the date that Section 281 comes into force, as Clause 21(5) provides, but he said that the offence itself would continue to apply until then. Clause 21 comes into force only in accordance with an order made by the Secretary of State, not when the Act itself comes into force, so for the time being assaults on immigration officers will continue to be dealt with under the existing law. In his letter of 5 July, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said that no separate statistics were held on these offences, but that in 2004-05 there were 28 assaults on BIA staff altogether. It was a little surprising that the Minister was unable to give a breakdown, because for all we know those assaults could have been against other staff working in the IRCs, Communications House and the AIT, for example, and if that appeared to be a problem there could have been an argument for widening the offence to assault on any employee of the BIA rather than immigration officers only. Perhaps when he replies the Minister will say why it was thought fit to confine this offence to assaults on immigration officers and not extend it to the rest of the BIA staff. The agency has around 17,200 staff in the UK, including agency, casual staff and consultants, and the Home Office has no idea whether immigration officers are particularly vulnerable compared with all those other people. If the Minister cannot say anything at all about the circumstances of the assaults that have taken place on immigration officers, then equally the Government have no justification for creating the new offence in this clause. It could be that in a subset of the 28 cases where the CPS decided to prosecute, common assault was the charge normally used, and that no problems had arisen with that. However, we shall never know because the noble Lord does not have that sort of information. If there were more serious cases, where actual bodily harm was inflicted on the officer concerned, this clause would not have come into play in any case because the offender would be charged under Section 47 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. It would be useful to know how many of the 28 cases that the Minister mentioned in his letter led to this or some more serious charge. Perhaps he can tell us. In the cases in which the charge was common assault contrary to Section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, we need to know what difficulties arose because the officer or one of her colleagues could not arrest the offender, not having the power of arrest in Clause 22. In cases of assault where no police officer was in the vicinity and the attacker absconded before the police were summoned, surely that problem would be solved by the power of detention in Clause 2. We still do not see the justification for creating this new offence, and I am afraid that nothing that the Minister said in Committee or in his letter has dispelled our concern.