Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and many other Members on both sides of the House and in both Houses, do very good work on that group, and I am glad that some of the Bill's measures will actually help in the fight against human trafficking. The Minister will be aware that we have been urging him to greater activity in this regard. We spent some time urging the Government to sign up to the convention against human trafficking, which they then did. They have now ratified it, and we can only hope that as a result of some of the measures in the Bill, this country will do better in combating trafficking than it has done in recent years. In saying that, I am not seeking to make a partisan point, as I am conscious that any British Government would have had problems with the explosion in trafficking in the past few years. However, I hope the Minister will take on board what I and the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, have said. There were stories in today's newspapers about a three-year-old Home Office report that suggested that the traffickers regarded Britain as something of a soft touch and thought they could use bribery and corruption to ply their criminal trade in this country and to smuggle people into it. That is hugely disturbing. I very much hope that the Minister can give some reassurance to the House that that report is being acted on. Frankly, it should have been acted on some years ago, but if it has not been, can he give us some reassurance that he is acting on it now? We welcome the improvements in the Bill—there have been four significant ones that will help. However, sitting back and looking at the Bill even in its improved state, I think it is clear that it is still a fairly incoherent mixture of measures, some of which will be mildly useful, some of which will be mildly damaging, but none of which will address the scale and size of the crisis in our immigration system over recent years. As has been said, we have an immigration Bill almost every year. I calculate that there have been eight of them under this Government; the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) always makes it nine.