Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

We feel it is important to specify who the Director of Border Revenue can designate as a customs revenue official as well as setting out in Clause 12 that she needs to be satisfied that the officer is capable of carrying out the functions effectively, has received adequate training—we have heard that that is for 14 weeks, while the other, which I did not mention before, is for 10 weeks—and is a suitable person. All those things have to be done, but we have extremely talented people who are capable of multi-tasking. I have great faith that they will do this job extremely well. Some are, effectively, already doing it. It is appropriate that designated customs revenue officials are within the department responsible for exercising customs functions. The border force will be an executive agency of the Home Office and will work within that department to ensure the main aim in creating the agency is fulfilled; namely, as the noble Baroness clearly mentioned, to integrate at the border the exercise of customs functions, both general and revenue, with immigration functions. In general, it is not intended that customs revenue officials should be a separate cadre; rather, that the officials of the Secretary of State working in the border force should, subject to that training, be able to perform a range of customs revenue, general customs and immigration functions as necessary. As I have said, we know how long the training will take and I am sure that they will be capable of that. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, also asked whether the Secretary of State will be able to designate a customs revenue official. No, she will not: the director will make such designations. The officer will be accountable to the director for the exercise of those functions, not to the Secretary of State. That is one reason why we have had to have that differentiation, because that cannot be allowed. On that basis, I hope that the noble Baroness will agree that the amendment is unnecessary and that she will feel able to withdraw it.