Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Viscount Brookeborough

Consideration of Commons amendments
Monday 4th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Brookeborough (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support Motion T1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Murphy. Because this is something which has been brought in, one must look at what the current situation is. The current situation is that it is an open border, and we have heard that there will be no one on it. Even before Brexit, the situation was that we had border officers at the airports and ports because of terrorism, drugs, human trafficking and whatever else. Those people are still there—so, in effect, what is this ETA actually going change? It is not going to put anyone on the border. We have already heard about people working either side of the border.

I declare interests in running a small tourism operation and because my brother is chairman of Tourism Ireland. I have not discussed this matter with him. He is perfectly aware of my feelings on it. However, the Minister rather brushed over consulting Tourism Ireland, Tourism Northern Ireland and the Government of Ireland—as if these discussions were going well. I have not spoken directly to people involved but it is my impression that these discussions are not going well. These two organisations and the Government of Ireland are entirely against this. They are against this in relation to the movement of people day by day doing everyday things. They are also against it from a tourism point of view.

A couple of years ago, the Government accepted that the passenger duty for airline passengers was an inhibiting factor, preventing airlines travelling to Northern Ireland because it was less in Dublin. They obviously accepted that it was an inhibiting factor because they dropped it and made it roughly equal—this was largely for tourists. So what are they proposing now? Putting on more than half of it to any tourist who wants to enter Northern Ireland. I ask the Minister for her honest opinion: if a £13 or £14 passenger duty inhibited people arriving in Northern Ireland, what is half of that—£6.50, plus apparently £10 or £12—going to do? Does she see this as an encouragement, or as something which will inhibit people coming north?

The Minister says that interested parties will be told—which must include travel agents and so on—in order to get people to put in for this. What will happen when somebody decides to come to Ireland as an island, and their travel agent says they will have to fill in an electronic form and pay extra money to go north, even if they want to come for a few hours? This is why I like the first amendment—because it talks about short periods of time. Noble Lords may not necessarily think that Northern Ireland is a holiday destination, but I can assure them that a lot of people do. In particular, the Titanic exhibition was voted the world’s leading tourist attraction a few years ago.

Those who have watched “Game of Thrones”—and I have not—will know that the world was hooked. Warner Brothers has invested millions of pounds in what is going to be an iconic visiting centre for “Game of Thrones” in Northern Ireland, and it is not all that far from the border. But what is going to happen? What does the Minister really think tourists are going to feel when they come to the island of Ireland and find a barrier? Some of us are pretty bad with IT anyway, and it is already difficult enough to do the filling in. Additionally, if this form is as light a touch as the Minister says, what possible checking can there be in it? Anybody can fill it in anyway. It is crazy to think that that will stop anyone.

We were talking just now about crossing the border; I will stop after this. Not only are Belcoo and Blacklion on opposite sides of the bridge, but we have in Fermanagh something that noble Lords probably do not know about: Concession Road, which runs between two Republic towns, Cavan and Clones, into the north and then back into the south. That is fact. If you had been on patrol at night during the Troubles, you would have known all about it. It caused immense problems, because Garda patrols were not allowed up that bit of road; we were allowed up it, but we had to cross a bog to get to it. The police could not get to it, because they did not particularly like bogs; they liked nice carts and whatever.

This is really unbelievable. The duty of government, surely, is to make laws not for filling pages of A4 but for something that can be implemented. Surely, it is a duty of government not to make laws that are entirely unenforceable.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise extremely briefly, my noble friend having done the praising the Government part, to offer Green support to the other, non-government amendments in this group. We have heard very powerful practical examples on Motion T1. On Motion M1, the argument that someone acting in good faith should not face a court case, particularly in a life or death matter, is obvious.

I will focus briefly on Motion B1 on the deprivation of citizenship. Commons amendments have tightened the conditions under which citizenship can be removed without notice and improved the judicial oversight. The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, is seeking to do that further with this. She said she was not against the principle of deprivation orders so I must lay out, very simply and clearly, that the Green Party is totally against the deprivation of the right of citizenship; citizenship should be a right that, once granted, remains. I must declare an interest here, because I am one of over six million people who are potentially affected by this deprivation of the citizenship right because, as anyone who hears me speak will know, I hold another citizenship. Many other people feel like second-class citizens in their own country, because they are; that right can be taken away as it cannot be from other people. All I can do is apologise to all those people that we have failed to get a parliamentary consensus for this and say we are going to keep trying.