UK Borders Bill

I invited the noble Lord to furnish us with some detail on that and I should be grateful if he could do that. Perhaps he could drop me a note on the issue and I will certainly cause some further investigation to be carried out. While I am on my feet, perhaps I should make plain to the Committee that the telephone pilot scheme is not, strictly speaking, a government scheme, it is a Legal Services Commission scheme and, in the end, it is for it to determine. It is evaluating the scheme and that evaluation is expected to be completed by October this year. It will be premature to talk about national roll-out at this stage. No doubt it will wish to consult others, including the Government, on that. Detainees can of course get advice from duty solicitors and I am sure that they will continue to do so, especially in relation to any criminal matters that have been raised with them. Both the Legal Services Commission and practitioners were concerned that crime duty solicitors were not best placed to provide advice directly to individuals held at police stations for non-criminal immigration matters. They must be right in that assessment—must they not?—because we want those caught up in the immigration system to be given appropriate advice and crime specialists will not always be able to advise on non-criminal immigration law. They may or may not be able to refer people to an appropriately qualified immigration lawyer. That might not be within their range of knowledge and expertise, especially when they are considering issues outside what one might term normal office hours. But we accept that they are a route to getting better advice.