UK Borders Bill

My Lords, we are also grateful to the Minister for one of only a handful of concessions that have been made by the Government all the way through the Bill. None the less, the amendment is welcome. I also thank him for his letter of 18 October following our discussion on the extension of the obligations in the code to private contractors. When we first raised the issue, we pointed out that many of the existing contracts had years to run and we asked whether the obligations would apply to them as well. I do not wish to repeat the examples that I gave except to mention Yarl’s Wood, the IRC where there have been major concerns in the past. The management was awarded to a new contractor in the spring and we were informed that one of the first things it did was to get rid of some 50 members of staff. To an outside observer, it was not clear how this would result in better compliance with the obligations in the code. But if it is not to be applied to that new contractor—if it is only to be applied to existing contracts when they are renewed—it will have two and a half years in which to get its act together, which would take a lot of the gilt off the gingerbread of this clause. We also hope that there will be a formal system of recording alleged breaches by contractors of the code of practice and of having them investigated, presumably by the BIA chief inspector, in collaboration with an appropriate independent agency such as the Children’s Commissioner. I accept that the code should not apply to fostering of UASCs, as I had suggested previously, because those arrangements are made by the local authority rather than the BIA. They would therefore be subject to Section 11. That was not entirely clear from the Minister’s previous answer and I would be grateful if he would comment on it.