UK Borders Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord most sincerely for giving the information on appeals under the points-based system and for his undertaking that, when guidance is published in March next year, it will indicate that a person applying for an extension of leave will have a 28-day grace period following the expiry of the previous leave. As the Minister said, having that knowledge in advance will be extremely helpful to practitioners; otherwise, as we have said all along, a person who failed to lodge the application in time or who made a mistake on the application and had to resubmit it would no longer have been eligible for consideration to extend his leave. That would put an end to the careers of, for example, students in higher education and work permit holders who had hoped to continue their work or studies in the UK. It is also useful to have on record the Minister’s confirmation that electronic monitoring could be considered in such cases, as in others. I asked the Minister a further question, which he did not have time to deal with. I am not going to pursue it here, but perhaps he will pick it up and write to noble Lords following these proceedings. The question was who, given that the decision to apply electronic monitoring is nominally that of the Secretary of State, will take it on her behalf and whether that person will have published guidance, which will be available to immigration practitioners. I thought that I had carefully gone through the reasons why the noble Lord said that he could not accept our amendment, but perhaps I did not thoroughly deal with the case that he mentioned today, in which the person had already served the sentence and was eligible for immediate release on conviction by the court. It was implicitly to deal with that case that I suggested that the decision on whether the person was liable to these provisions should be made when they are being charged rather than, as the noble Lord suggested, waiting until 10 months before the expiry of the sentence. If the decision had been made at the moment of charge, it could have been decided whether the offence fell into category 2 or whether, at the time of conviction, it was likely that a sentence of 12 months or more was going to be passed. There need be no delay between the decision by the court and the issue of the deportation notice under the automatic provisions of the Bill. But I can see that, unfortunately, we are not going to persuade the Minister this afternoon that these provisions are unnecessary, so I will for the moment beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Clause 44 [Search for evidence of nationality]: [Amendment No. 34 not moved.]