Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, I begin by strongly agreeing with my noble friend Lady Hanham’s general comments concerning the overall standing and status of the Bill, and where it ranks in the importance of Bills. Whatever else it is, it is not a great Bill. I also strongly agree with her suggestion that we should press the concept of a borders police force. She has my strongest support for that. This is a question of what people do, rather than what they wear. The Minister in his engaging opening speech referred with excitement to the forthcoming London Fashion Week, with border guards sashaying down the runway in their doubtless glamorous new outfits. That is all very well, but it is what they do, not what they wear, which is of importance to this House. Some of the pressures at the borders of the UK may be mitigated by the unforeseen consequences of the present global economic malaise. Economic migrants—a term much and rightly used by my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell when he was Home Secretary back in the 1980s; I do not know whether he coined it, but he certainly popularised it at the time—may be less willing to move to better themselves, whatever the pressures that face them at home, if they perceive that the economic conditions within the United Kingdom have turned sour, thanks largely to the policies of this Government over the past 11 years, I am bound to say. If I was one of those multihanded economists—we all know them—I would doubtless go on to say that, on the other hand, poor global conditions might encourage more of the disadvantaged, the criminal and the money-launderers to travel and perhaps to try our borders. However, in these matters I have only the one hand and I stick to my prior sense of what is going on globally in economic terms. The fact that some pressures may abate for a bit must not allow us to relax our attempts to ever backfill our permeable borders against threats old and new, including terrorist incursions. Any self-styled borders and immigration provisions—I shall briefly mention just one citizenship matter when I conclude my remarks—should pass at least three tests. The first test is whether the legislation will keep us safer. The second test is whether it will promote community cohesion between settled and newcomer; on this, I very much understand what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln said about the need to be welcoming. Finally, the third test is whether it will help to promote economic welfare and growth. Looking at each of these in turn, I think that the legislation tightens to some extent matters at frontiers, which on the face of it may be helpful in public safety terms. However, can the Minister reassure me on three points? First, will the new powers to be applied at borders be in all respects identical in their effect in the six territories mentioned in the Bill, which are England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, whatever legislative route, of which we have various here—new provisions, amendments and doubtless orders—is used in relation to the Bill? Secondly, will there be improvements in manning and surveillance to follow what seem to me welcome provisions in Clause 46 to control all persons arriving in the UK by whatever means from the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? If there are no improvements in surveillance and manning, there will be no point to this provision, with its apparent defence against illegal immigration, persons subject to an arrest warrant, money-launderers or, indeed, potential terrorists. Without a commitment to such additional provision, the words in the Bill would be quite meaningless on the statute book. Hitherto, anyone travelling by, for example, an overnight boat from Guernsey or Jersey to our southern ports will have been struck by the usual absence of any form of obvious customs or police presence in the early morning disembarkations. There may be surveillance by remote means, but of obvious policing there seems to be none at all. Thirdly, will the Minister assure me that he and his colleagues have taken advice to ensure that the golden and timely opportunity presented by the Bill to include any necessary emergency provisions to guard our borders against particular and peculiar terrorist threats of an extraordinary sort has not been overlooked? I declare my interest, as I should do, as a member of the advisory board—this may surprise your Lordships—of the British Olympic Association, for which I am uncompensated and unexpensed and which mercifully makes no demands on me physically or athletically. The Minister told me in a helpful Written Answer on 22 January that organisations such as the security services and the Serious Organised Crime Agency have a job to co-ordinate with the UK Border Agency in relation to the 2012 Olympics. However, do they have all the emergency powers that they need under the provisions before your Lordships? There is time for government amendments if not. However, in the context of this Bill and of preparations for 2012, I remain alarmed that, shamefully, there is no security plan yet for the Olympics—Ministers said only last week that it will be two or three months before there is a plan—because border security is a vital component of such planning. My second test is whether the Bill helps to promote social cohesion between the settled and the incomer. Again—a point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln—there seem to be few specific provisions in the Bill. My third test concerns the need for our borders and immigration legislation to do nothing that prevents economic well-being and growth. It strikes me as vital that all these provisions are applied in a way that does not give in to economic nationalism or protectionism, let alone the near return to 16th or 17th century mercantilism, all three of which are currently stalking the economic globe. We need orderly movement of labour as well as of capital, and we need orderly movement of talented people as much as liquidity of capital. We need openness, because ultimately that is important not only in trade but to the people whom we need here, whether they are economic migrants, to whom I have already referred, or talented as well as needy refugees—the sort of people to whom the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, referred in his introductory remarks. These people may help us to power recovery from our present economic discontents after the past 11 years. I end, mindful of wanting to get the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, to his plane, on one citizenship point. I remind the Minister that Protocol 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights both guarantee the right of nationals to enter their country of nationality. The Minister has stated on the face of the Bill that in his view the legislation is compatible with convention rights. Yet, despite our being a signatory to these and other human rights instruments, British nationals, as defined, who are not full British citizens do not currently have the right to enter the UK, unlike under EU laws that already allow some millions of EU citizens—I happen to welcome them—to live and work here. I woke one morning to hear the Minister on the media describe himself self-deprecatingly as a simple sailor. In that spirit, I should like to ask him whether he can give a very simple answer to my question, ““Why is that?””, in a way that a simple Peer such as myself might be able to understand.