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I must say as gently as I can to noble Lords opposite that I hear what they say about this Government’s record, but I do not agree with them for the reasons that I have set out.
However, it is clear that change is needed, because we are now faced with the need to bring about systemic change that will be better able to meet the new challenges with which we are now faced. Therefore, I very much welcome the comments in support of the changes that the Government now seek to make.
As I have indicated, I hope that we will be in a position, with the leave of the House, to discuss in greater detail the other supplementary documents that we hope to produce soon. This is an important and significant change and I welcome the welcome given to it.
4.37 pm
Lord Tomlinson: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for repeating the Statement made in another place. Much of what she said was fairly general regarding the problems of the immigration and nationality department. But will she confirm that not everything done by the immigration and nationality department should be condemned? For example, extremely valuable work is going on to facilitate the entry into this country of students wanting to enter further, higher and other forms of education. The immigration and nationality department’s work in the Joint Education Taskforce, on which I have the privilege to serve, is extremely welcome and of enormous benefit, both in the short term and the long term, to the interests of this country, and is being done extremely well under the chairmanship of Alan Bucknall in the Home Office.
Will my noble friend confirm that the new
system planned to be introduced relatively shortly in relation to
managed migration in the education system will not be detrimentally
affected, because it is warmly welcomed by nearly all the participants
in the Joint Education Taskforce and will not only bring great benefit,
but is very much a high-level government
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Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I am very happy to confirm what my noble friend has said. I hope that in the statistics I provided I indicated that I do not agree with the impression given by noble Lords opposite that this system was wholly unfit and, therefore, to be derided. There is much to celebrate. Our work on the Joint Education Taskforce is but another demonstration of the excellent work being done in the Home Office to the great benefit of those who are able to take advantage of that.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick: My Lords, the Statement refers to the Government’s further plans to rebalance the criminal justice system. Can we expect a further Statement on that before the House rises and, if not, when?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, we will certainly make another document available. The noble and learned Lord knows that whether this House accepts another Statement will be a matter for the usual channels. I assure him that it is our intention to make such a Statement available. The usual channels will then have to decide whether this House is minded to take it.
Lord Waddington: My Lords, have not the Government to face up to the fact that in the fairly early days of the Labour Government, there was a collapse of morale in IND on it becoming apparent that Ministers had little or no interest in the maintenance of fair and firm immigration control? Cannot one moral be drawn from that? The efficient implementation of policy is important and good systems are important but even more important is political leadership, with the staff knowing clearly what the department is supposed to be doing and where it is going. We will not get very far unless the Government stop blaming staff and recognise, albeit belatedly, that the cause of the Home Office’s problems over the years has been a massive failure of political leadership.
Baroness
Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I must say to the
noble Lord how much I disagree with him in relation to the failure of
leadership and that this Government have not blamed staff. My right
honourable friend the Home Secretary says that even the best staff, if
they were working within a system that is fundamentally flawed and if
they did so for 24 hours a day, could not deliver that which they could
deliver if they had a smooth, effective and efficient system. That is
what we are seeking to change. We inherited a system that was moribund
and we tried to work within it, and we got limited but good results.
Having got the best results out of it, it is now time to change. Noble
Lords opposite may not wish to remember this but I hope that they will
recall that staff levels were dramatically cut under the previous
19 July 2006 : Column 1306
The Countess of Mar: My Lords, it was with deep regret that I tendered my resigned to the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal a fortnight ago. I did that because I could no longer bear the incompetence of the whole business. I was giving cases my most careful and anxious scrutiny day after day knowing full well that the whole system that that was built on was flawed.
The noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, gave a list of faults under this Government. I attribute quite a lot of the problems to the Tory Party’s removal of work permits in 1992, which led to an increase in the number of asylum cases. Before that, asylum claimants used to be the intelligentsia from other countries but after that we got the people who came over mainly from the Asian subcontinent to work here for two or three years, to build their brick house in Pakistan, Bangladesh or India, and then to go back; then someone else would come over. A whole industry built up with agents taking thousands of pounds from families in order to get one person into this country to work. The agents used to say, “You will have to go through the system but at the end don’t worry—you will not be removed; you will stay”. Those people would have gone back in the past but they now stay.
Does the Minister agree that it is necessary to pay much more attention to people at entry points in airports? I know that in some cases—Heathrow Airport, for example—the immigration and customs posts are not manned in the early hours of the morning. Don’t kid me—the agents know this and that is when they bring people in. We do not know who goes out. I think it was this Government who stopped counting the people who leave. We need to know who comes in and who goes out. We also need much more co-operation between the Home Office and the Department for Constitutional Affairs. The Department for Constitutional Affairs is now cutting back on immigration judges and wondering why the cases are piling up, causing another backlog. Perhaps the noble Baroness could pay attention to those factors.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, we shall pay attention to those issues. The noble Countess will know that a huge part of the work that we have done in recent years has dealt with managed migration, giving people legitimate, honest, decent routes through which to come to this country, allowing them to come here in an honourable and transparent way so that those who come here to work diligently will have a better opportunity and will not fall prey to those who take advantage of their need to earn money to help their families back home. We have already seen some movement in that regard which is very beneficial.
I
hope the noble Countess knows that embarkation controls are now being
considered. New electronic
19 July 2006 : Column 1307
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean: My Lords, when I served as a Minister of State in the Home Office, five years after the Cold War, I was not aware of any problems arising from the Cold War. A number of prisoners escaped and we found it extremely difficult to deal with that because we had to deal with an agency. Therefore, I fail to understand how Ministers passing the buck to a new agency will enable them to provide the necessary leadership. If the Home Office has been doing such a brilliant job, as the Minister indicated, why did the Secretary of State describe it as not fit for purpose within hours of arriving in the department? How can he possibly embark on a wholesale reorganisation of the department after being there for only two months? I realise that he thinks he is very bright, very brilliant and very tough, but most of us ordinary mortals take at least three months to read into the brief of a department, far less decide on a wholesale change. Is this not yet another eye-catching initiative to get the Government out of the trouble that they have created? What is needed in the Home Office is the recognition that Ministers have put burden upon burden on good civil servants and that the organisation has cracked under the failure and incompetence of their leadership.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, there has been no failure of leadership. I take issue with the noble Lord in that regard. It is very important for us to remember the context in which my right honourable friend the Home Secretary used the phrase “not fit for purpose”. Although others have used that appendage in relation to the whole of the Home Office, as I am sure the noble Lord knows well, my right honourable friend was referring to foreign national prisoners and the system that was in place within the IND to deal with that small part. When one engages in political rhetoric, I appreciate that accuracy sometimes falls by the way.
The whole import of my right honourable
friend's work, together with the work of the Home Office team and the
officials, was to look with a fresh eye at what could now be done to
get more for the front line, to respond to the needs that have been
identified by the people of the country, to work on the empirical data
that we now have regarding what works, and to make changes to enable us
to make the quantum leap that we believe it is necessary to make on
behalf of the people in our country. We are building on good, solid
practice. When noble Lords look at the changes we are minded to make,
it will confirm, improve—we
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Lord Soley: My Lords, does the Minister recall that when the Cold War came to an end—I was an MP at the time—we got a dramatic influx of Polish people, particularly in my constituency? They started arriving in large numbers. It was hard to argue that they were refugees. Both political parties have yet to get this right, although my feeling is that the present Government have been getting it right in the last few years, but there is further to go. I welcome the separation of the immigration and nationality department. As the noble Countess, Lady Mar, said, it has been failing for a long time.
I have one further request for my noble friend, on something where the Opposition are on rather safer ground than some of their other criticisms. Certainly, in the past, I could not get people deported who had sometimes committed murder; I got that in the press in the early 1990s. It is not new. We must address the fact that we have been making too much legislation in this area, and a period of consolidation would be a good idea.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, as one of those usually burdened with that legislation, I could not possibly comment. But I can certainly assure your Lordships that we need have only that legislation necessary to deliver this agenda. We have committed ourselves to that.
I should have answered another issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, about the new agency. In case there is a misunderstanding, I say that there will be no passing the buck to it. Political direction, strategy and strategic control will remain within the Home Office and with Ministers. The agency will deal with the operational issues which the Passport Office and others have demonstrated can be ably delivered through that sort of framework. When we have the second document, on how that transition is to take place, we will doubtless be able to debate the minutiae of those arrangements more keenly.
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster: My Lords, the experiences of the Passport Office and Prison Service have shown both the advantages and disadvantages of turning departments into agencies. I am glad that the Minister has drawn attention to the successes of the IND in recent years, which have tended to be overlooked because of recent developments and troubles. I invite her to be cautious in moving the IND to agency status, and not to hurry it. Once it is in a steady state and its operational objectives are clearly stated, understood and approved by Parliament, then would be a good time to put it on an agency basis. It would be wise to defer that change until that more steady state can be achieved.
Baroness
Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I thank the noble
Lord for those comments. He speaks with great power from his experience
on both the challenge and
19 July 2006 : Column 1309
Lord Mackay of Clashfern: My Lords, When the new Home Secretary described the Home Office as not fit for purpose, I understood him to refer to the whole office, not to any particular department in it, although I have no doubt that he had his mind on one part of the office in particular in coming to that conclusion. His statement was reasonably plain. I had some contact with the Home Office as part of my responsibilities in a related department for a number of years, and I had considerable respect for those who served as civil servants in it. I felt rather sad—I may have been completely wrong—that they should be described as working in an office that was not fit for purpose.
The noble Baroness has been a Minister in the Home Office for some time. Can she tell the House whether the plans proposed today were drawn up since the new Secretary of State arrived or were in preparation under his predecessor?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, the plans are an amalgam of issues that were being contemplated and new issues that have come to the fore. For example, noble Lords will know that for some years there has been a debate about whether agency status would inure to the advantage of the management of migration. This House has debated that on a number of occasions. Some noble Lords on the Benches opposite were particularly supportive of the suggestion that it would be a way forward. It is not possible to say that all the issues simply fermented during the time that my right honourable friend has been Home Secretary, but they have crystallised—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean: Cobbled together!
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that crafting something with such skill needs more than a cobbler.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, in view of the litany of praise we have heard from the Minister for all that has happened in the Home Office, will she explain why any part of that department was described as unfit for purpose? Can she explain why the former Home Secretary was sacked by the Prime Minister in a pretty unpleasant manner? Would she not agree with the noble Countess, Lady Mar, that until we have an effective system of monitoring those who leave the country, we will never know how many applications are no longer active because the people concerned have returned home?
19 July 2006 : Column 1310
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I hate to remind the noble Lord of his Government’s failings, but he will remember—
Lord Tebbit: Embarkation control!
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, the noble Lord points his finger and waves it at me, saying “Embarkation control”, but I remind him that his Government decided in 1994 that embarkation control was no longer necessary. We continued that policy for a time, but we have subsequently seen the fatal error therein and now seek to reverse it. We have done so through the electronic process, and I assure him that we intend to succeed.
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