UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Clause 16, page 10, line 32, after ““condition”” insert ““, for which he must be provided with written reasons,”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, Clause 16 empowers the Secretary of State and his officials at the Border and Immigration Agency to impose residence and reporting conditions on any person whatever granted leave to enter or remain in the UK unless that grant is for an indefinite period. Those who could be subjected to these conditions in theory include refugees, international students, work permit holders, highly-skilled migrants, tourists and other visitors, and family members of those who are already settled here. Although none of these groups has been identified as a target, the potential was expressly conceded by the Government in Committee when the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office said, "““we have not named students with limited leave as one of the categories that we will apply the provisions to at this stage. However, the power is broad and we do not deny that these measures could cover anybody with limited leave””.—[Official Report, Commons, UK Borders Bill Committee, 13/3/07; col. 302.]" So hundreds of thousands of immigrants therefore face the possibility that they may be required to report monthly, weekly or even daily to an immigration officer, to reside at a specified address or to be present at that place of residence at particular times. This follows from the drafting of the clause, which leaves the purpose for and the circumstances in which the conditions may be set wholly at large. Such conditions might be highly intrusive with the potential to disrupt studies, work and other economic activity, and ordinary family and private life. As drafted, the clause does not explain what its true purpose is or why, if the limitations on its use in practice are to be those that were outlined by the Minister in Grand Committee, they could not have been written into the Bill. We know that the intention is to apply the conditions—initially, at any rate—to UASC and foreign prisoners, though not those covered by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill now in another place. Since the clause is far wider than that, however, there has to be accountability if and when it is used for other categories of person. That is the immediate thrust of the amendment, but it also allows us to remind the Minister of the assurance he gave at the end of the debate on a previous amendment on conditions on 12 July in Grand Committee. He promised ““something comprehensive”” and said that the department, "““ought to be able to provide some sort of feedback through the LGA from local authorities about the desirability … of specialist local authorities””.—[Official Report, 12/7/07; col. GC 261.]" Noble Lords who are interested in children will remember that there was a consultation in progress on the Government’s planning for better outcomes and support for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children under which it was proposed that these children should be concentrated in 40 to 50 local authorities, with responsibility each for about 100 children, in four regions that were outside London and the south-east, where they are concentrated at the moment. However, in the Minister’s letter to me of 19 July following that session of Grand Committee, although he gave me a lot of information about the numbers of UASC and the need for better management of contact with them—and we hope the letter was useful to some of the agencies with which we shared it—he did not mention the specialist authorities. It was not until 18 September that he wrote again to say that the responses to the consultation, which were originally planned to be published at the end of August, had been delayed so that the Government could announce their decisions arising out of the consultation at the same time. The target date is now the end of November, which effectively prevents your Lordships from making any contribution, as we could otherwise have done to the debate on the treatment of UASC if the original timetable had not been scrapped. At what point was the decision referred to in the letter of 19 July taken? It must have been before the end of August, so why were noble Lords not informed until three weeks later? Does the Minister not agree that his undertaking to provide feedback from the LGA on the specialist authorities idea—given in Grand Committee and therefore, I hope, equivalent to an undertaking given on the Floor of the House—should have been honoured irrespective of what was decided about the rest of the answers to the consultation? When a Minister says he will produce something in any debate and the information is available, does he have the right to delay the publication for three months on the grounds that he wants it to appear simultaneously with something else? As the Minister knows, we are sympathetic to the concept of the specialist authorities, and we can see that paragraph (v) will be necessary to make it work. That is why our amendment asks only for written reasons to be given for the reporting, not the residence, condition. If all the UASC were concentrated in the 40 to 50 authorities, contact management could be improved significantly, and should any child abscond or go missing the authority concerned should know about it immediately and inform the BIA accordingly without disrupting every child’s education and other activities by requiring him or her to attend the nearest BIA office. I beg to move