UK Borders Bill

moved, as an amendment to Amendment No. 1, Amendment No. 1A: 1A: Before Clause 1, leave out subsection (2) and insert— ““(2) The UK Border Police Force shall have the functions of— (a) protecting UK borders; (b) strengthening frontier protection against threats to the security, social and economic integrity and environment of the United Kingdom; (c) preventing and detecting human trafficking; (d) maintaining and improving a safe, ordered and secure environment in ports; and (e) such other functions as the Secretary of State may by order determine.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I hope that the House is not confused by the fact that the Marshalled List does not show Amendment No. 1A as an amendment to Amendment No. 1, just moved by the noble Baroness. That is apparently a simple clerical error, and I hope your Lordships will allow me to move this amendment. First, I take the opportunity of welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, to our proceedings. Her enormous powers will be fully challenged because she has come straight to the Bill from the legislation that she has just been dealing with so competently—I listened to a few minutes of the debate on the Greater London Authority Bill. Knowing the competent and effective way in which she has always dealt with local government legislation, we will expect no less from her on the equally challenging areas of immigration, asylum and nationality, for which she has now inherited the mantle. That is not to say that we will not greatly miss the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, whose company we always enjoyed. We hope that we will see something of her from time to time, although we will, perhaps, not hear her speak from the Front Bench quite so much in view of her new duties. I thought that we had quite a productive discussion at the beginning of the Grand Committee on the sort of legislation that is needed to set up a unified border force, and I thought that the Minister had gone a long way towards conceding the principle when he spoke about the border management programme, under which there is already improved intelligence, joint risk assessment and areas in which the three agencies can work on behalf of each other to increase drugs seizures, reduce people smuggling and counter the threat from terrorism. We also had a reference to the Government’s e-borders system, about which I am not quite as sceptical as the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, because it is well under way. It is a multi-agency IT programme to deliver common information and risk assessment software on all passengers entering or leaving the United Kingdom. It is scheduled to be in full operation by 2014, although I understand that some components are already delivering substantial benefits. Maybe the Minister can say a bit more about that in his reply. We naturally believe, as we said in Grand Committee, that these functions can be carried out more effectively by a unified border force. To that extent we go along with the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham. We also consider that, as we have explained and I will not go into the detail again on this occasion, such a force should have jurisdiction only at the ports of entry and should not extend itself into the area suggested by the Conservatives, such as the employment of illegal immigrants or the trafficking of human beings. On trafficking, I must remind the noble Baroness that just before the Recess we had a debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh. The consensus of the House then was that the broad strategy, which is being followed by the Government with the UK Human Trafficking Centre acting as the focal point between the police, local authorities and the voluntary agencies, was the right way ahead. Of course we can all point to areas in which extra resources would be helpful. So, if we are realistic, the convergence of the border agencies into a single unified organisation is likely to come about incrementally and will probably be IT-led. We welcome the fact that the Government are actively thinking about the problem. We hope that they will seize every opportunity for interchanges of personnel and—to pick up one of the points made by the Minister in Committee—work towards the harmonisation of the cultures of these agencies. I beg to move.