My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register. As noble Lords will know, I frequently get up to speak on the rights of trade unionists. I am also president of a trade union affiliated to the TUC.
The purpose of this discussion is to encourage the Minister to go away and, we hope, say, “Well, they made some good points there. We had better bring forward some amendments. We ought to change same of the provisions of this Bill because it really doesn’t work.” Hence, I am speaking in support of the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Davies.
In Amendment 57B, the noble Lord is seeking to delete the phrase
“the captain of the ship or aircraft, the train manager of the train or the driver of the vehicle must"—
not “can”, “should” or “might consider”, but “must”—
“if so required by an immigration officer or the Secretary of State prevent P from disembarking”.
Immigration officers are also in trade unions. They have a very difficult life. Who is going to decide what they actually order the captain of the aircraft to do? Anyway, if the aircraft is up in the sky and it is suddenly discovered that someone is on board who should not be, what is the captain supposed to do? The captain of the aircraft has two principal jobs: to bring the passengers safely to the destination, and to do the same for the plane. They are not prison warders.
In many cases, of course, if this happened mid-air, they would not have realised the situation when they took off. Those of us who have been around a long, long time and can remember the hostage crises of many years ago will know that the situation became apparent only when aircraft were actually in the air. I am not asking the Minister, “will they be prosecuted?” because the Bill says that they will. I want to know under what circumstances it is envisaged that prosecution will be brought, and by whom it will be brought. Will it be the DPP, the department or the Minister? What will be the aim of the prosecution?
Amendment 58A would delete, amongst other things, the phrase
“knowingly permits a person to disembark in the United Kingdom”.
What is someone in that situation supposed to do? If a train comes into a station, it is very difficult to stop people getting off it. Noble Lords who have travelled to Brussels will be well aware of the number of times it is announced over the Tannoy that “You must not disembark at this station”. If someone does disembark, however, has the driver knowingly permitted them to
disembark simply because they have gone into a station? Should they have stopped in the middle of the countryside? I ask the Minister to look at whether there should be an indemnity for transport workers, so that these provisions are not used to prosecute them. If they are, why should any pilot take the risk of flying an aircraft that might have an asylum seeker on it? Rostering is voluntary: you do not queue up and say, “you go there”. That is where the weakness lies—I diverge slightly—in the minimum strikes legislation. You cannot order people to do things, not in a free society; and that is where we live.
I ask the Minister to talk to the transport unions and to his own department about what it is trying to do with this and whether it will actually work. What concerns me about this Bill, as with the minimum strikes legislation, is that we are progressing rapidly towards a fairyland where pass legislation that just will not work. It is not a good thing to do, because it does not breed respect for legislation. I, and many people in Britain, want illegal immigration to stop. There is a general feeling out there in the country, particularly among the trade union members that I deal with, that you should not be able to cheat the system. But you have to make this Bill work to achieve that, rather than just achieving headlines for the Daily Mail, and for us all to look smart. The challenge is to make this work, not to make it look good.