My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Paddick in this amendment and I have added my name to it. I spoke earlier about the potential of the right-to-rent clause in this Bill to set back race relations by decades. In declaring their intent to create a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, the Government risk poisoning the environment for all immigrants. Although the right-to-rent clause will undermine the already delicate relationship between landlords and tenants and will increase racial discrimination, this clause, criminalising the possession of a driving licence by an illegal immigrant, takes the potential for racial discrimination several dangerous steps further. By all means criminalise the possession of a driving licence by an illegal immigrant, but do not ask the police to enforce the measure through random stop and search. We have already heard eloquent arguments about why, if we decide to move in this direction, we must address it with very great caution.
Why not approach it differently? Why not, for example, have a hotline for this offence too? Why not use the same hotline that landlords are asked to use? In fact, I think the police already have a direct line to the Home Office to ask whether anyone they have stopped in a car randomly is legal or otherwise. Clauses 41 and 42 extend stop, search and seizure powers—powers that have a long history of being acknowledged as contributing to racial disharmony and breakdown in community cohesion. In 1981, Lord Scarman in his report on the Brixton riots concluded that the mass use of stop and search was a direct cause of the riots.
A great deal of power already resides with the Home Office to revoke the licences of illegal immigrants without resort to a measure that would damage the public’s relationship with the police, who would become the whipping boy of immigration officers, as the National Black Police Association rightly says. The weak link is the enforcement of the rules that currently exist and the Government would do better to concentrate on improving those.
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