Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My noble friend Lord Avebury gave a good explanation of our position, which has just been reinforced by my noble friend Lord Roberts. I should like to ask the Minister a couple of questions. The first question concerns the very real threats to this country that are almost never talked about. The Minister is tasked to deal with terrorism issues which, quite rightly, are in the forefront of his mind, but threats to the general population can occur through health risks and through animal health risks. If we were back in the years of foot and mouth, that issue would be at the forefront of noble Lords’ minds in this House when debating borders and border forces. How will the new force be more effective in dealing with such issues? I hope that it will be because there has been a continual failure to deal with the smuggling of meat products, which was one of the issues that led to foot and mouth. My second question concerns the risks that a physical border is unable to deal with: that is, issues around e-crime and e-terrorism. As the Government, rightly, physically strengthen our land borders with personnel to deal with particular issues, what effect will this have on pushing crime and terrorism on to the internet; for example, by encouraging terrorists to go down the completely different route of cyber attacks as opposed to physical attacks? While these attacks may not threaten life in the same way, the results economically could be devastating to this country. Finally, I would be sad if the effect of this was to conflate immigration and asylum-seeking issues with criminality as a matter of course. We must strongly resist that route.