Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I am sorry if I was going into too much detail on some of these clauses. Rather than drilling down on this, the point made by the noble Baroness was rather broader and I shall try to answer. Effectively, we are getting some 4,500 HMRC officers who are working for Revenue and Customs on the borders; they are borders people, not people who work on revenue deep in the UK or deep inland and so on. They are customs-type people who understand customs rules; they are customs officers—the chaps who are normally at the ports and that sort of thing. The aim is that those people become part of the border force. As I have said, the shadow force has already stood up. That border force includes them and the people who were in the BIA—now called UKBA—and are immigration officers who understand immigration law, and have practised immigration matters and that sort of thing. We have also sucked into the border force people like the visas officers abroad and other little ancillary groups, who together will make the totality of the border force. Clearly, we wish to use customs officers as part of this border force, partly to obtain more flexibility by having one person who can do customs and immigration, because that will mean that you go through one person and do not have to go through two people to get into the country. This gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of drafting people to small ports, moving people around and those sorts of things. That person will need to have training which enables him to understand and perform the immigration functions. The immigration officers who will be carrying out a customs, HMRC, function will have to be trained to do that. In the detail of the Bill it is stated that we will not do that with every single one of them, because we do not need to, but many will have that dual training to be able to do both things. Already, for example, the Home Secretary has a responsibility for some general customs matters, including drugs smuggling, weapons smuggling, plant and animal health controls, and so on. We intend to move across to the border agency functions such as collecting duty at the red channel, catching tobacco smugglers and charging duty on postal packets, which are already on the border. HMRC will still do all the deep revenue things within the country, totally separately from any of this. However, because we do not allow Ministers to get closely involved in those revenue customs matters, we have to set up a division of responsibility whereby the officer in the Home Office responsible for the agency actually has another hat, which allows her to be responsible to the Treasury for these particular matters. I hope that that clarifies this issue a little more, but the proposal gives us huge flexibility, it lets us use this force more usefully, it means you do not have to go through two checks when going through, it means you can deploy people to small ports, and it means we can use our force. We are not going to cut jobs by doing this; we are effectively increasing the size of our border force and giving it that single focus. I know that some people might think that this is amusing, but the fact that all these people are already in a uniform makes a—