Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, I must start by apologising for running in and out of the Chamber during the early stages of this debate. I was rather more concerned with the more immediate citizenship question, looking at the European Community’s citizenship directive as it related to Dutch citizens and their right to come into the United Kingdom. Having consulted a number of British and Dutch colleagues, I am satisfied that Article 27 of the EC citizenship directive and the Home Office letter to Geert Wilders stand up. It is a delicate and difficult question, but we all need to take on board that the charge that he is under in the Netherlands, the incitement of religious hatred, is something that the British Government, rightly, take seriously. That is also an apology for not being here for all the opening speeches. I support, and have done for some time, the creation of a British borders agency. I have very little to say about Part 1 of the Bill, not being sufficiently expert in it; I wish merely to point out that when one creates a borders agency, we are heavily into co-operation with our neighbours. I think I am right in saying that the number of Border Agency staff currently stationed in France is already approaching 1,000. The only way that one protects one’s borders, as the Finns and others have told us in EU co-operation, is by co-operating very closely with those on the other side. That also means that one cannot protect Britain’s borders without thinking actively about how one protects other borders. The United Kingdom Government are in some delicate relations now with Frontex, the EU borders agency, but it is clear, as Tony Blair said when Prime Minister some years ago, that for many purposes Britain’s frontiers are now in the Mediterranean. Defending Britain’s borders therefore requires active co-operation with our friends and neighbours in other border agencies across the European Union. On Part 1 I will merely add that I have puzzled for many years, and asked in this House, why the Government have made no plans to separate those passengers arriving at British airports from within the European Union from those arriving from outside it. In border management terms, in the medium term and even more in the long term, that is a highly desirable development that we should have been planning into the building of terminals but have failed to do so, most clearly with Terminal Five. I want to talk mainly about Parts 2 and 4. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, made a useful—and, I felt, in some ways despairing—speech about the important concept of citizenship and the way that the Bill slides piecemeal into a bit of it without tackling it all head-on. We learn here about earned citizenship and about active citizenship; the noble and learned Lord also talked about learnt citizenship. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford: we need also to take on board the whole issue of dual citizenship, not just at the bottom end but also at the top. Among my family and my close relations there are people who hold British and Irish passports; British and American passports; British and South African passports; British and Dutch passports; and British and German passports. That is likely to extend further in the coming years. If we are talking about citizenship, it is not just a question of requiring the arriving Somali or Bangladeshi to demonstrate their active commitment to Britain; we probably also need to talk about some of those at the top end of British life and community who think that they live here non-domiciled and do not pay tax—the ultimate inactive citizenship. There are a large number of issues that are not really covered in the Bill but to which the whole citizenship debate needs to extend. This morning, with reference to Sri Lankan residents in this country, I was looking up where the largest numbers of foreign residents in this country are drawn from. Of the top 10 countries, five are rich: the United States, Ireland, Poland, France and the Netherlands. It is not just a question of migrants and asylum seekers; we have some very large questions about the dispersal of our sense of a single national community across the developed, as well as the developing, world. The criteria by which one earns citizenship and the degree to which Part 2 allows a great deal of flexibility for administrative judgment are something that we will need to explore more in Committee. The concept of ““exceptional service”” in Clause 37, for example, is very unclear—would we say that interpreters working for the British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan had performed exceptional service that entitled them to British citizenship? I would, but Her Majesty’s Government have not behaved so far, in their attitude to people who work as interpreters with the British armed services in Iraq, as if that was in any way exceptional. We are going to want to hear rather more about what the content of such criteria might be. The meaning of ““good character””, in Clause 43, is even less clear. The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, talked about British nationals serving in other armed forces; this Bill is about the very large number of non-British nationals serving in the British Armed Forces, which is not that far short of 10 per cent of our Army if one includes the Gurkhas. The Bill assumes that the figure is a constant, or perhaps will even increase further. It is on the fringes of the Bill, but it is an issue of public policy of some importance. On students, I declare an interest as a member of the largest lobby in this House, which the press oddly failed to pick up: the academic lobby. We are not paid specifically for our lobbying in the House, but we are very active, assertive and even on occasions self-righteous. I am puzzled by the problems with which Clause 47 exists to deal. We have worked for some years on how to get rid of bogus colleges. Compulsory registration seemed to be a relatively straightforward way of resolving the problem. The lack of co-ordination between the Home Office and what is now DIUS is clearly very much at fault. The costs to students as they go through—I declare an interest as a PhD supervisor, having a number of students who have spent more than three years here—are high. Given that the British higher education sector is a major contributor of high-value international services, there are some major issues here that we need to explore further. However, as a former holder of an F-1 student visa in the United States, I recognise that these things are acceptable; it is just a question of how they have to be managed. In Committee I shall explore Clause 53(5), on the extent to which the Bill will apply to the Crown dependencies. It states: "““Her Majesty may by Order in Council provide for any of the provisions of this Act … to extend, with or without modifications, to any of the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man””." Such a clause comes up in a very large number of Bills and enables the Crown dependencies to cherry-pick. Given that there are major issues here of border management and of tax evasion—with which HMRC and those parts of it which will go into the border agency are concerned; for example, value added tax evasion for the Channel Islands—as well as issues of freedom of residence in both directions, I give notice that in Committee I shall want to explore the clause further.