Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, the Government have talked regularly about the biggest shake-up of our border control and immigration system for a generation. The familiarity of the description should not disguise its truth. The Government are making fundamental changes throughout the system—to key policies, to organisations and to the information and technological support that underpins it. The points-based system, e-Borders and the introduction of ID cards for foreign nationals are just some of the headline changes. We have recognised that we must, as an integral part of these changes, reform the legal framework that underpins the UK Border Agency’s work. Last July, we started that process by publishing for scrutiny a draft partial Bill, which will replace all the current layers of primary immigration law with a single new Act. We intend to publish that Bill—a completed and revised draft immigration simplification Bill—before the end of this parliamentary Session. We remain committed to that programme of legal reform. We want to ensure that we engage fully with our stakeholders and produce as comprehensive and polished a new Bill as possible. Meanwhile, the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill will make a number of priority changes to the law. The Bill makes changes necessary to border functions and on the journey to citizenship. The Government believe that the security of this country’s borders is best served by a UK Border Agency that can give both customs and immigration powers to its front-line staff. The UK Border Agency, like the Home Office of which it is part, has an overriding objective, which is to protect the public. The agency works on a daily basis to secure our border and to control travel and migration for the benefit of our country. As a result of this Government’s creation of the UK Border Agency in April 2008, there have already been real successes: the prevention of more than 21,000 individual clandestine attempts to cross the channel illegally; the screening, using the e-Borders system, of more than 75 million passengers travelling to and from the UK, which has led to more than 2,700 arrests, including of murderers, drug dealers and sex offenders; the removal of 5,000 foreign criminals in 2008, exceeding the record in 2007 of 4,200; and the issuing of more than 1,000 fines, worth over £10.5 million, against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Significantly, many people—including the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, who mentioned this in Questions on Monday 27 October last year—have noted that the UK Border Agency’s staff provide not only security but a professional, welcoming and now uniformed presence across the UK’s ports. Indeed, a new uniform is coming in from April. I had it modelled for me this morning, prior to London Fashion Week in about 10 days’ time. Many of the proposals in this Bill, which I look forward to discussing with the House, stem from the Prime Minister’s announcement in July 2007 of the creation of the new agency. They build on the recommendations in the Cabinet Secretary’s report Security in a Global Hub, which looked at this further. The measures in Part 1 of the Bill will address the report’s clear recommendation for the implementation of a unified passport and customs checkpoint. They will allow the formal transfer of customs functions and staff integrating customs frontier work. There has been debate—I do not doubt that it will continue—on whether this goes far enough and on whether the police should form an integral part of a much bigger unified border police force. This proposal has superficial attractions but, when we looked at it in detail, as in government we must, it is not so attractive. There are some very real operational downsides, not least in managing the potential dislocation from local policing that might result from the creation of a new national entity. Moreover, I am sure that now is not the time to contemplate the costs and risks involved in and the organisational upheaval entailed by such a fundamental further change to the way in which we control our border. Of course, let us not forget that the police are already very close partners of the UK Border Agency, and this seamless co-ordination works well. In addition, the UK Border Agency has a new Memorandum of Understanding with ACPO, a police chief constable has joined its board and ACPO is considering whether there might be further options for the active enhancement of existing collaborative arrangements. The Bill makes the functional and management changes necessary for customs and immigration to work together at the border. It will allow us to complete a process which is already under way and proving its worth. From April until the end of December 2008, our officers seized in excess of 800 million cigarettes, representing a potential loss of £150 million in tax revenue. They seized £260 million-worth of illegal drugs and have taken more than 5,000 dangerous weapons off the streets. The Bill will allow the formal transfer of up to 4,500 officers, currently with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, to the border force, augmenting that force with officers trained and designated with the necessary powers to enable them to perform immigration and customs functions at a primary checkpoint. This integrated approach to combating illegal immigration and the smuggling of drugs and weapons will help to ensure the security of those who travel to and from the United Kingdom, and protect the tax base and thereby the economy. The provisions in Part 1 allow us to complete the process of integration and further enhance our operations. I move on to the citizenship part of the Bill. This Government believe that migration brings benefits to our nation but we understand that the British public rightly demand that we have robust systems in place to control those coming here. We will ensure that those who want to stay earn the right to do so, learn to speak English and play by the rules. Those who do not do so will not be allowed to become citizens. The provisions in the Bill on citizenship follow the Green Paper, The Path to Citizenship: Next Steps in Reforming the Immigration System, published last February. Our migration policy must strike the correct balance between the economic benefits that inward migration undoubtedly brings and the impact that it has on those already here. Our proposals in the Bill on earned citizenship are part of making that balance work. We want to integrate migrant workers into the country in a way that benefits both the migrants and the communities that they join. The public have responded very positively to our initiatives to encourage newcomers to complete the journey to citizenship. We want to encourage those with the right values to become citizens. With rights come responsibilities, and those responsibilities must first be demonstrated, ensuring that the benefits of British citizenship are earned. This is at the heart of the Government’s firm-but-fair system. I note the contribution that my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith has made to the wider debate on citizenship. I see that he is in his place today and I look forward to his remarks. His report was wide-ranging, informing a significant and wider debate of what it should mean to be a citizen of this country and going beyond the more specific question of how newcomers should acquire British citizenship. I hope he will agree that the approach of earned citizenship which we have developed, and which this Bill supports, goes with the grain of his thinking. The wider debate will of course continue and I hope that he and the House will accept the Bill as the Home Office’s initial contribution to that debate. I now turn in more detail to the structure and contents of the Bill. Part 1 deals with border functions and will enable the concurrent exercise of certain functions of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs by the Secretary of State, her officials and a newly created post, the Director of Border Revenue. General customs functions—for example, the prevention of drug smuggling—will be vested directly in the Secretary of State. The border revenue functions of the agency will be vested in the Director of Border Revenue. Such functions will include the prevention of revenue smuggling and the collection of duties and taxes from passengers and on international postal packets. Officials at the border will all be UK Border Agency staff. We intend to ensure that there is a clear, single management line by allowing the chief executive of the UK Border Agency and the Director of Border Revenue to be the same individual. We are proposing a strict confidentiality regime in relation to personal customs information gathered and retained by the UK Border Agency. A person who unlawfully discloses such information may be subject to criminal prosecution. This reflects the protections afforded under the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005. Much of the provision in Part 1 is technical—consequential to the mechanics of the conferral of customs functions to the UK Border Agency. HM Revenue and Customs will remain in the lead on internal collection issues and on policy for maintaining the overall customs regime. The UK Border Agency will take responsibility for matters at the border. Part 2 makes necessary changes to nationality law to allow the introduction of earned citizenship. The Bill sets out requirements that must be met for naturalisation as a British citizen. Migrants will, as now, need to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the English language and of life in the United Kingdom. There will be minimum time periods during which those who are here as economic migrants will need to continue working and those here as family members will need to remain in a subsisting relationship. Those who have demonstrated active citizenship—engagement in the wider community—will be able to speed up their path to citizenship. This is complex, and a design group involving contributions from across the third sector has been established to agree how this will operate in practice. We expect those applying for citizenship to have obeyed the law and played by the rules. Criminality will be a consideration through the whole journey to earned citizenship. Migrants will, as now, need to be of good character and we will normally refuse those who have unspent convictions. We will refuse applications from those who persistently and repeatedly commit minor offences. We will normally refuse applications from those given custodial sentences and seek to deport those convicted of serious offences. Part 2 also makes clear the esteem in which this country holds members of the Armed Forces who are not British citizens but who serve this country. Foreign or Commonwealth citizens serve with distinction and in some numbers, with more than 7,000 Commonwealth nationals and more than 3,500 Ghurkhas in the Regular Forces as part of the British Armed Forces. The Bill proposes a new route of registration for children born outside the United Kingdom to a Foreign or Commonwealth parent serving in the Armed Forces and ensures that those born in the UK to a serving parent will continue to be British from birth. Furthermore, the Bill removes a historic cut-off date in nationality legislation to enable British mothers to pass their citizenship to children born to them before 1961, in the same way as British fathers have always been able to do. I trust that the House will welcome these changes. Turning to Part 3, Clause—