UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 7: 7: Clause 5, page 3, line 34, after ““information”” insert ““that is specified in an EC regulation or in any other international agreement to which the United Kingdom is party”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, in Committee we tabled an amendment that sought clarity and reassurance from the Government on the use of other non-biometric information as referred to in Clause 5. We specified what data might be included, such as name, date and place of birth, address, immigration status and national insurance number. As the clause stands, it could oblige any person subject to immigration control to provide unlimited information for unlimited purposes. For example, regulations made under Clause 5(2)(d) could require that any person who is required to reply should provide detailed information about her medical history, which could then be used for purposes that have nothing to do with immigration by virtue of Clause 8(2). We are concerned about the open-ended nature of this provision, and indeed of the regulation-making power as a whole, since it is not confined to matters dealt with in the paragraphs, each of which is governed by the words ““in particular””. The powers are completely unfettered so long as presumably they have some connection with BIDs, however remote. We are dealing with sensitive personal data, which is why we propose to limit the data to what is strictly necessary for the job. In Grand Committee, the Minister said that limiting the information as we were then proposing would mean that the United Kingdom could not use the biometric immigration document provisions so as to comply with the requirements of a forthcoming European Commission regulation. We therefore now propose that the BID may contain any information, "““that is specified in an EC regulation or in other international agreements to which the United Kingdom is party””." This will enable the UK to comply with the regulation that the Minister had in mind or any other international obligation that we may take on in the future. However, it will still put a definite boundary around the power to add anything else to the BID at the absolute discretion of the Secretary of State. As the Minister knows, we are not happy to leave this question to be decided when an order is introduced, even under the affirmative resolution procedure, which he described as being a very powerful one. If, when the affirmative resolution is tabled, we consider that some of the non-biometric information to be specified for inclusion in the BID goes beyond what is strictly necessary to satisfy our international obligations and is not in fact necessary for immigration control purposes, there will be nothing that we can do effectively to correct what we would then consider to be a misjudgment by the Government. We would be unlikely to vote against the order and risk scuppering the whole BID project and we would be unable to amend the order so as to remove the offending provisions. This, of course, is a general observation that applies to all affirmative resolution orders. There is a case to be made for pre-legislative scrutiny of draft orders that are likely to be controversial, as this one may well be if the amendment is not accepted by the Government, as I fear. The Minister did not comment on my off-the-cuff suggestion at the end of our previous debate, either at the time or in his subsequent letter of 11 July, on other points raised in the second Grand Committee sitting. Perhaps if he had done so we could have saved time this afternoon, but I still think that we would have wanted to hear his defence today of this extraordinary power. I beg to move.