Without tempting Madam Deputy Speaker to chastise me, what I would say is that if my hon. Friend writes to me, I will look at the details. At the end of my remarks, I will set out briefly why the immigration Bill would not be the right place to deal with this issue, but I will not do so at any length.
Let me finish what I was saying in response to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge raised. I hope that former members of the armed forces and the service charities they deal with will notice—indeed, I hope they have noticed—an improved level of customer service from UK Visas and Immigration. That is certainly something that the Home Office wants to achieve, and I hope we will be able to deliver that.
Before I close my remarks, let me briefly address the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch raised earlier—to be fair, I said that I would do so. His question was: why would it not have been appropriate to deal with this issue in the immigration Bill? The short answer is that that Bill addresses three topics: first, access to public services; secondly, putting into primary legislation the rules on article 8 that the House put in the immigration rules last year; and thirdly, dealing with appeals and removals. That Bill does not make changes to the nationality provisions of our legislation,
because I did not want its scope to be that wide. I wanted to focus on the Government’s priorities for reforming the immigration system; I did not want us to get bogged down in the many nationality questions that I know we might otherwise have considered.
My hon. Friend the Member for Woking has introduced a focused Bill, dealing with a genuine problem. It is not a problem that affects thousands of people; rather, it affects potentially hundreds of people, but they are people who have done great service to our country. The approach he has adopted, in introducing a very focused Bill that has support from both sides of the House—the official Opposition and the Government—is the right way to proceed. I very much hope that the Bill will receive a Second Reading and a fair wind in reaching the statute book.