UK Borders Bill

My Lords, this Scottish view is most instructive and I look forward to hearing the Minister and being further instructed. I hope that it is in order to refer to Amendment No. 1A before us, which is not to belittle the Scottish questions that have just been raised. Amendment No. 1A is clearly to be preferred. If I look at the first page of the Marshalled List, I find that paragraphs (a) and (c) of subsection (2) of the proposed new clause in Amendment No. 1 are quite specifically focused in the direction of ““illegal overstayers”” and ““illegal immigrants”” and in the case of paragraph (c), the employers of the latter. Of course those are significant questions and I have no doubt that were the House, as I hope it will, to prefer Amendment No. 1A, those would be among the functions that the Secretary of State would by order determine. However, Amendment No. 1, in putting first what it puts first and then adding to it with paragraph (c), contributes to the anxiety around the country and in sections of the press about this whole question. It is a real question and there are real difficulties both for the country as a whole and for those, as we shall find later in this discussion, who are thought to be illegal overstayers or illegal immigrants. But to list them in this new clause in effectively four points, because subsection (5) is a catch-all, contributes to the danger of ratcheting up anxieties that are much better cooled and taken rationally. I prefer Amendment No. 1A to Amendment No. 1 for those reasons.