Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]

I will certainly accept your ruling, Mr. Speaker. Nevertheless, we are glad that this very important Member of the other place has been appointed. Yes, this is another Bill, and I hope that the Government will now have the opportunity to draw a line under the plethora of immigration Bills that we have seen over the past 12 years. The hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) puts the number of such Bills at nine; the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) thinks that it is 11. I think that it is 10. Perhaps the smokescreen that has been created by all these Third Reading debates on immigration Bills means that the three of us need to sit down, possibly with the Minister, and work out exactly how many Acts of Parliament on immigration have gone through. This Bill has a number of important features, but I would like to draw attention to a key point, which I hope is reflected in the two reports that the Select Committee will publish next week. They are the long-awaited report on the points-based system, which has taken us a year to complete, and the report into bogus colleges, which has taken only about three weeks because we had clear evidence in front of us. The key point is that further legislation might not be the answer. What we actually need is administrative control of the Border Agency. This is point that we put to Lin Homer when she came before us last week and to the Home Secretary today. One of my concerns about the Bill, although I welcome the fact that it clarifies what the Government expect the chief inspector of the Border Agency to do, is that it puts too much responsibility on this individual, who also came before us to give evidence earlier today. The post was created by the Government following the abolition of four other posts, including the independent monitor, the race adviser and the audit committee. That, of course, followed on from the statement of a previous Home Secretary who had said that the Home Office, and particularly the immigration and nationality directorate, was "not fit for purpose". I thus worry about the clauses that place a greater responsibility on the chief inspector, who, as we tried to point out in our evidence session today, is actually the independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency. The Minister himself wrote to our Committee as a result of our representations and said that from the time he wrote to us onwards he would always refer to the chief inspector of the UK Border Agency as "the independent chief inspector", yet when we look at the Bill, we find that the word "independent" is missing. It is important for the Minister to stick by the commitments he has made to Parliament through the Select Committee. He must ensure that this individual, Mr. Vine, is independent, is given the resources he needs to complete his job and is given appropriate direction. We were told today that his first report is going to be on the visa regime in Rome—a wonderful place and a great city, but one does not need visas to come from Rome to the UK. We would much rather that the independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency were doing the job that he is expected to do and that Parliament has asked him to do, which is independently to inspect the UK Border Agency. I hope that the clauses that place new responsibilities on this inspector will enable him to do his work effectively. On citizenship, which is an essential part of the Bill, the Select Committee produced an interim report—we could not conduct a final analysis of the draft Bill because so much of it was missing when it came before us—and we hope that the new arrangements for earned citizenship will be monitored very carefully indeed. I am not against people earning the right to come into this country. I came as a first generation immigrant. What the Minister will probably find—he has a large diaspora especially from Bangladesh in his Oldham constituency—is that there is excitement within communities about gaining citizenship. We are not against provisions to give people certificates, as people feel very excited about becoming British citizens, but I worry that we are putting on people who try to acquire citizenship under the arrangements in the Bill a greater onus than we are on people born in this country who are already British citizens. After all, we expect those who come as immigrants and want to be British citizens to sit and take tests on the country's institutions, whereas many citizens from this country do not know what those institutions are.