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Correspondence

David Winnick: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department when the hon. Member for Walsall, North will receive a reply to his letter of 10 August on behalf of a constituent, reference PO9259/4. [188009]

Mr. Browne: I replied to my hon. Friend on 8 September 2004.

Data Protection

Harry Cohen: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department with whom consultation has been held on (a) the range of data items which are to be stored in the database of registered facts and (b) the potential for subsequent use and disclosure of personal data from the database of registered facts; and if he will make a statement. [185960]

Mr. Browne: The Government published a draft Identity Cards Bill on 26 April 2004 setting out the legislative framework for a national identity cards scheme. A 12-week consultation was held in accordance with the Cabinet Office's Code of Practice on Consultation.

Over 3,000 copies of the consultation paper have been distributed including to all Members of Parliament, all the representative organisations that had commented on the earlier consultation and acquisition libraries across the UK. The consultation also appeared on the identity cards website (www.identitycards.gov.uk) and invited comments from individuals and organisations.

We are now carefully analysing all the responses received. The Government will take account of these comments on the draft Bill before it introduces substantive legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows.

The House of Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs is undertaking a formal scrutiny of the draft Bill and will be publishing a report.

Gosport War Memorial Hospital

Mr. Viggers: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) when he expects inquiries into medical and nursing practices at Gosport War Memorial Hospital to be concluded; [186616]
 
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(2) how many man hours have been expended by staff at Gosport War Memorial Hospital in responding to inquiries about medical and nursing practices at the hospital. [186617]

Paul Goggins: I can confirm that the investigation by Hampshire Police is ongoing. To date over 90 cases have been examined by a panel of experts and some of these have in turn been identified as requiring more detailed scrutiny. The investigation of the first four of these cases should be concluded by September 2004, but it is likely that the inquiry will stretch into 2005. Every effort has been made to ensure that the families and other interested parties are aware of the timescales involved.

Information is not available centrally on the amount of time which hospital staff have used in responding to police inquiries.

Hate Crime

Mr. Woodward: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what further proposals the Government have to extend the powers of the criminal justice system to prevent hate crimes. [186872]

Fiona Mactaggart: My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced in his speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research Institute on 7 July that as soon as the legislative opportunity arose the Government proposed extending the existing incitement to racial hatred laws, contained in the Public Order Act 1986, by creating a new offence of incitement to religious hatred.

Identity Cards

Chris Grayling: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what assessment he has made of the technological potential to combine identity cards with passports containing electronic data. [187388]

Mr. Browne: As part of the work to set the requirements for identity cards, the level of compatibility with technical standards proposed for electronic passports is being examined. However, no decision has been made on whether to combine technical standards for identity cards with any other documents.

The UK Passport Service is already committed to introducing a biometric passport containing electronic data in 2005.

Immigration

Mr. Liddell-Grainger: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what steps he is taking to monitor the level of illegal immigration into the United Kingdom. [186554]

Mr. Browne: By definition, illegal immigrants fall outside of official statistics and are therefore difficult to measure. Official estimates of the numbers of illegal entrants to the UK or estimates of the size of the illegally resident population in the UK do not exist. The Government have commissioned research into the methods used in other countries to estimate the size of the illegal population in order to define methods appropriate for the UK.
 
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We are committed to maintaining robust pre and on entry controls to prevent illegal immigration into the United Kingdom and there are many strands of work currently being undertaken to ensure the integrity of UK Border Controls. These include:

The increasing involvement of organised crime in illegal immigration led to the creation in 2000 of Reflex, the multi-agency forum which brings together key law enforcement players including the Immigration Service, as well as relevant government Departments and the Security Services, under the chair of the National Crime Squad.

As part of a longer-term strategy, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) manages an expanding network of Immigration Liaison Officers (currently 12) in key overseas posts who work closely with local law enforcement agencies to combat illegal migratory flows.

A network of Airline Liaison Officers working closely with airline staff at key locations worldwide, who offer advice to carriers on the admissibility of passengers seeking to travel to the UK.

Working closely with UK Visas to put in place visa fraud officers at a number of our missions overseas to enhance further the quality of visa issues.

Introduction of a range of initiatives designed to reduce the numbers of those who arrive without adequate documentation or concealed in vehicles. Such measures include the roll out of New Detection Technology to search vehicles for would be clandestine entrants prior to embarkation for the UK, and the introduction of juxtaposed controls at strategic locations overseas to pre-assess eligibility for entry.

Mr. Oaten: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement on the joint work of immigration officers and British Transport Police in London in identifying illegal immigrants; and how many individuals have been (a) questioned and (b) arrested as part of the operation. [187059]

Mr. Browne: Over the past 15 months the UK Immigration Service (UKIS) has participated in a variety of joint multi-agency street crime operations in London, initiated by both the Metropolitan and British Transport Police (BTP). Focusing on crime hotspots, the Immigration Service has been invited to attend where an immigration offence is expected. The deployment of immigration officers in public places is a legitimate activity within the spectrum of our mandate of enforcing immigration laws.

While immigration officers do not have the same powers as the police to stop and search individuals in public places, they may legitimately question people to determine their immigration status where there is reasonable suspicion that a person is an immigration offender.

Records of (a) the number of people questioned or (b) the number of people arrested as part of the police-led crime reduction operations are not kept centrally. However, locally collated provisional information indicates that between May 2003 to July 2004 the UKIS participated in approximately 235 such operations which resulted in the arrest of around 1,000 immigration offenders, including 717 failed asylum seekers.

While officers routinely record the details of persons questioned in their individual notebooks, these data are not collated centrally.
 
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The Government have made it clear that they are taking a robust and determined approach to tackling illegal immigration, and removing from the UK those who no longer have a legal right to be here.

Mr. Rosindell: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will set out the immigration figures for each of the past 14 months. [184255]

Mr. Browne: Latest available figures on international migration are given in the table.
Total international migration⁽⁷⁾: United Kingdom, 2001 to 2002 Thousand

	All migration
Year and quarter(8)	Inflow	Outflow	Balance
2001	480	308	172
Of which:
March	100	60	40
June	113	65	48
September	178	103	75
December	89	81	8
2002	513	359	153
Of which:
March	105	75	30
June	117	81	36
September	197	124	73
December	95	80	14

⁽⁷⁾ Figures are estimates derived from the International Passenger Survey and other sources—these are Home Office data on asylum seekers and their dependants and estimates of migration between the UK and the Irish Republic from the Irish Central Statistical Office.
⁽⁸⁾ Quarters are labelled by their final month, e.g. March denotes the quarter January to March .
Source:
National Statistics (www.statistics.gov.uk).

Monthly data is not available.

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