Clause
20
Seizure
of
Cash
Damian
Green:
I beg to move amendment No. 150, in clause
20, page 11, line 15, after
‘officer’, insert
‘and a constable in the UK Border
Police Force established under section [Establishment of UK Border
Police Force]’.
The
Chairman:
With this, it will be convenient to discuss the
following: amendment No. 151, in clause
40, page 21, line 41, after
‘constable’, insert
‘, including a constable in the UK
Border Police Force established under section [Establishment of UK
Border Police
Force],’.
New
clause 4—Establishment of UK Border Police
Force—
‘(1) There shall
be a body corporate to be known as the UK Border Police
Force.
(2) The UK Border Police
Force shall have the functions
of—
(a) detecting and
removing illegal
overstayers;
(b) protecting UK
borders;
(c) investigating
employers of illegal
immigrants;
(d) preventing and
detecting human trafficking;
and
(e) such other functions as
the Secretary of State may by order
determine.
(3) Membership of
the UK Border Police Force will be comprised of officers
from—
(a) the
Immigration Service;
(b) HM
Revenue and Customs;
(c) the
Serious Organised Crime
Agency;
(d) specialist port
police forces;
(e) the
Metropolitan Police Security
Command;
(f) the Security
Services; and
(g) such other
organisations as the Secretary of State shall by order
determine.
(4) Before making an
order under subsection (2)(e) the Secretary of State
shall—
(a) publish
proposals;
(b) consult members
of the public and stakeholders;
and
(c) lay a draft before each
House of Parliament.
(5) Bodies
to be consulted under subsection (4)(b) shall
include—
(a) the
Metropolitan Police
Commissioner;
(b)
representatives of the Association of Chief Police
Officers;
(c) the Director
General of the Immigration and Nationality
Directorate;
(d)
representatives of the Serious Organised Crime
Agency;
(e) representatives of
the Association of Police Authorities;
and
(f) such other people as
the Secretary of State shall
determine.’.
and
amendment (a) thereto, leave out lines 2 to 7 and
insert—
‘(2)
The UK Border Police Force shall have the functions
of—
(a) protecting UK
borders;
(b) strengthening
frontier protection against threats to the security, social
and economic integrity and environment of the United
Kingdom;
(c) preventing and
detecting human
trafficking;
(d) maintaining
and improving a safe, ordered and secure environment in ports;
and
(e) such other functions as
the Secretary of State may by order
determine.’.
Damian
Green:
With this group of amendments, in particular new
clause 4, we come to the biggest failure of omission of the Bill; it
makes several failures of commission, but this is the issue that would
be most important in making it defective. We all agree—it is one
of the issues that does not divide any of the
parties—that we want a robust border system and we want our
borders to be policed and guarded much more effectively than they have
been in recent years. There is an enormous coalition behind the idea of
a specialist border force.
Kitty
Ussher (Burnley) (Lab): Will the hon. Gentleman give
way?
Damian
Green:
That wins a record for early interventions, but I
will happily give way to the hon.
Lady.
Kitty
Ussher:
The hon. Gentleman mentioned his proposals for a
border force, which are outlined in the new clause. Why does he think
that Migrationwatch, when it gave evidence on Tuesday, as I understand
it at the request of his party, said that the last thing that the Home
Office should do is have a reorganisation of the kind that he
proposes?
Damian
Green:
I was going to come to Migrationwatch later in my
remarks. At this stage, I merely make this observation; if the only
body that supporters of the Government can pray in aid for their policy
is Migrationwatch, then matters have come to a pretty sorry state for
Ministers.
I agree
with Migrationwatch on some issues; I disagree with it on some other
issues. The fact that the Government can find no one else in the entire
world to support their position, other than Migrationwatch, is both
noteworthy and fundamentally hilarious. It shows how isolated the
Government have become and how desperate Ministers have
become.
I turn to the
people who have huge expertise in policing, and who are in favour of
our proposals. It is clear that any country that is serious about its
security—and never has that been more important than it is
now—must have properly policed borders. I suspect that Ministers
and even the hon. Member for Burnley would agree with
that.
It
is also clear that, as a series of islands, the United Kingdom ought to
find its borders relatively easy to protect, as compared with countries
that have huge land borders, particularly with countries whose
economies are much poorer than theirs. That applies to the United
States and its southern border, and countries with borders on the
eastern edge of the EU. As was mentioned, those borders have moved in
the past few years, but the same conditions apply now as applied a few
years ago. The overall point remains that Britain ought to be
relatively easy to protect, yet we have one of the most inefficient and
porous border protection systems in the world. Under this Government,
we do not know who is coming in or going out. My party has always found
that
unacceptable.
The
Under-Secretary is perhaps about to repeat the canard that it was a
Conservative Government who removed border controls. I remind the
Committee that they took off controls within the EU. It was in
1998—the last time I looked, this Government were in power
then—that controls for the rest of the world were removed. That
was one of the litany of disastrous decisions on immigration policy
that this Government have taken—it must be in the top three
worst ones—and is one reason
why Britain does not have effective border controls.
[
Interruption.
] My hon. Friend the Member for
Peterborough invites me to discuss the notorious case of the one-legged
roof-tiler who was allowed into this country, but as it is probably not
in order, I will not do so. However, he makes a viable point, and
perhaps the Minister should stop giggling, as his predecessor had to
resign over the incident. That was one resignation that actually
happened.
The
problem is that no single UK-wide force is charged with securing our
borders, preventing and detecting illegal immigration and tackling
people trafficking. Under the present arrangements, several different
agencies are involved, and they report to different Cabinet Ministers.
There are six different bodies responsible for one part or another of
defending our borders—the immigration service, Revenue and
Customs, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, specialist port police
forces, the Metropolitan Police Service security command and the
security services—so it is not surprising that there are
problems. With the best will in the world, such fragmentation of
responsibility is likely to lead to
problems.
Talking
about organisational fragmentation leads directly to the point that Sir
Andrew Green made in evidence, which was that at difficult times one
should not try to reorganise things. I believe that that was the basis
of his argument, because he went on to say that one day a border police
force might be useful. Indeed, the Minister seemed half to agree with
him in what I thought was one of his more intriguing remarks during the
evidence
session.
Sir
Andrew Green is perfectly free to make that point, but Ministers are
not. In the midst of a crisis at our borders, they are, of course, in
the throes of the most enormous reorganisation of the whole immigration
department. They are regionalising it for no particular purpose, they
are engaging in what is called a transformation programme—what
is being transformed is not at all obvious to anyone who deals with the
IND—and they are turning it into a shadow agency, which is
another intriguing proposition that will produce benefits as yet
unquantified by anyone. Ministers are going through three different
reorganisations at the same time, so they simply cannot say with a
straight face that reorganisation is a bad idea at this
time.
There are six
agencies dealing with our borders, and it is perfectly clear that the
system is not satisfactory. Within those agencies, there are obviously
many thousands of people who are, one way or another, responsible for
protecting our borders. We seek to bring together those disparate
groups of people so that they can be much more coherently managed and
so that powers can be shared. At the moment, apart from the
fragmentation inherent in the involvement of so many bodies, there is
the problem that different people have different powers and that often,
particularly at small ports, the relevant collection of powers is not
available to provide the degree of protection that people
want.
10.15
am
As I said,
across the various organisations, border security is dealt with by a
nominal total of approximately 10,000 people. They would form the basis
of the new force—we seek to co-ordinate them rather than,
necessarily, to create more posts.
One of our reasons for proposing
a border police force is the experience in other areas of crime
prevention. As the Home Office has seen, specialisation of police
services is effective in fighting new types of crime. The criminals
involved in people trafficking and international terrorism are becoming
increasingly vicious and sophisticated, so we need a unified force to
detect illegal immigration and prevent the misery of the trade in human
beings and the entry into the UK of terrorists or suspected terrorists.
We are considering in detail whether the new force should be part of
SOCA.
Ministers will
be aware that we asked Lord Stevens, as one of Britain’s most
distinguished police officers of the past few decades, to look at the
details, and we are grateful to him for having undertaken that work. He
has said that it is essential that Britain should have secure borders
and that one element of that must be a dedicated and effective border
police force. He is not the only distinguished police officer who has
called for such a force. When SOCA was set up, Sir Ian Blair, the
current commissioner of the Met, was quoted as saying,
“it surprised me that we did not
have a national border police...I have always thought that having
a national border police was a good idea...I am very supportive of
this issue.”
Not only are
previous and current commissioners of the Met in favour, but the former
head of the Association of Chief Police Officers has also called for a
single border force. Sir Chris Fox said that a single force would
have
“total
responsibility for all our points of entry...I think that will make us
a far more co-ordinated organisation against criminality and illegal
entry...we need all those objectives being brought together with one
organisation that makes decisions about when is the right time to
act”.
So, many
distinguished policemen support the idea, and so does the Home Affairs
Committee. In its 2001 report on border controls, it recommended
that
“existing border
control agencies should be combined into a single frontier force on the
basis of secondment and direct employment, but with clear lines of
communication back to the parent agencies. Pending the creation of a
single frontier force, strategic co-direction of better joint working
should be provided by a ministerial
group.”
That was six
years ago. It called for better co-ordination—the Minister will
no doubt argue that that is being provided—as a step towards a
unified agency. However, in those six years, the Government have chosen
to ignore that wise advice.
Finally, while I am quoting
those who agree with us, I welcome the support of the Liberal
Democrats, who have tabled an amendment to which, I dare say, the hon.
Member for Rochdale will speak. They, too, argue for a truly integrated
force. I hope, therefore, that the Committee understands that it would
be a coalition of people including some with widely differing views on
immigration policy, and various other things that we are discussing,
but who are united in their desire for a practical proposal to make our
borders more robust. Any country serious about its security ought to
have properly policed borders, but ours are not. We are not defended
properly against drug dealers, people smugglers, gun importers or
terrorists, all of whom find it too easy to bypass the current
system.
The Government’s big
idea, which I dare say we will hear again, is ID cards, which
demonstrates that their priorities are completely wrong. We have seen
already from our debates on this Bill that in protecting our borders
they would be ineffective and expensive. They would waste up to
£20 billion without performing one of the most basic
tasks—securing our borders. We think, therefore, that our
approach is much more practical and are grateful for the support of
many of those with the most expertise in the area. We think that there
is an enormous gap in the Bill. If it is aimed at making our borders
safer, it will fail in its endeavour, unless the Minister accepts the
new clause. I commend my amendments and new clause 4 to the
Committee.
David
T.C. Davies:
My colleague on the Front Bench spoke at
length, and eloquently and powerfully, in favour of a border security
force. I do not wish to reiterate all his points. Obviously, we all
agree on the problems with maintaining border controls at the
moment—hence the Bill before us.
I visited Cardiff airport
recently, at the invitation of customs, to see how they do things. I
noticed that there were various organisations with different powers all
trying to do essentially the same job—to manage immigration. I
have to say that the system seemed to work fairly well in Cardiff,
although, obviously, when a politician visits
anywhere—[Interruption.] Yes. As we all know, unless we
are all completely naive—I am sure that no Member is—when
we go on visits, we tend to see what people want us to see and hear
what they want us to hear.
I felt, however, that things in
Cardiff were working quite well because it is a small airport with a
relatively small number of people, all of whom have got to know each
other and, therefore, can call upon each other for help when required.
Quite often such help is required because an immigration officer with
one set of powers sometimes has to ask somebody from passport control,
for example, who has other powers, to intervene because they cannot do
the same things. I picked up another message: the good working
practices that I saw in Cardiff are not present at larger airports,
such as Heathrow, or larger ports, where a greater volume of personnel
cannot get to know each other in the same way. People do not know each
other or who to call when they have a problem. The whole system,
therefore, is rather
disjointed.
Damian
Green:
I remind my hon. Friend of a very powerful point
made on Second Reading. Cardiff might benefit from being small enough
for people to work together, but large enough for them actually to be
there. My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson)
pointed out that at Newcastle airport, and others slightly smaller than
the one at Cardiff, there is often no protection at all. For many
airports in the country it is not a question of whether people work
together—there is no one there at
all.
David
T.C. Davies:
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Cardiff
airport, in effect, had peripatetic customs officers who travelled
between Cardiff, Bristol and various other airports and ports. By a
remarkable coincidence, it just so happened that, on the day that I
visited, a whole minibus full of customs officers turned up. That was
very fortunate indeed!
My hon. Friend made a good
point: there are not enough people in many smaller ports. Another point
raised with me was that the equipment used for screening containers and
people—
It being twenty-five minutes
past Ten o’clock
,
The
Chairman
adjourned the Committee without Question put,
pursuant to the Standing
Order.
Adjourned
till this day at Two
o’clock.
| 
