Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill
Julian Lewis Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Chope
I do not think I can comment on that, particularly because the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) is not in the Chamber.
We then come on to the question of penalties. Let me illustrate the point with an example. I have a constituency case of a person who came here on a visitor’s visa. As they are married to a British citizen, all they needed to do was keep renewing that visa but they did not apply for an extension within the specified time and as a result they have been refused a new visa. I discussed with them whether they should appeal against that refusal, but there is no power of appeal and the advice that is given is that if an in-country application for a visa extension is rejected the person should voluntarily make their own way back to the country from which they came as it is possible they might be subject to a deportation order in due course. Of course, under the law a deportation order is subject to appeal so the authorities do not want to make many such orders as the appeals would clog up the immigration tribunal system. People therefore overstay their visas with impunity as there is effectively no sanction against them. The only sanction arises if they want to visit their country of origin to see a relative or something like that, when they suddenly find that they do not have the right paperwork to get back into the country. They can lie low in this country with impunity for months or years.
I think it would be reasonable to say that somebody guilty of an offence on summary conviction should be subject to a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment or a fine that would be unlimited in England and Wales and would not exceed £5,000 in Scotland or Northern Ireland. A person would be brought before the court and, under the provisions of clause 2(2), would be ordered to be deported.
Unlike the present laws relating to deportation, which are rarely exercised, certainly for relatively minor offences—they are not applied in the cases to which I have referred—the deportation order would be mandatory unless the Secretary of State certified that it was against the public interest. In practice, the person would come before the court and, if found guilty, would be fined and deported or imprisoned, probably not for very long, pending deportation. The deportation would be ordered by the court, rather than the immigration authorities—the Border Agency—which is what happens at present.
An official from the Scotland Office contacted me, wondering what will happen in Scotland when the Bill is on the statute book. She pointed out that in Scotland deportation orders are not made by the courts; they merely make a recommendation to that effect. She agreed that there is nothing to stop the courts being given the power to make specific deportation orders, which I think is fundamental to clause 2. If people are here without legal authority, the most important thing is that they are deported as soon as possible, rather than kept in custody at great expense. Rather than being subject to a recommendation of deportation, they should just be subject to deportation.
While driving to the House this morning, I saw a big, brand-new van on which were the words, “Home Office Immigration Enforcement”. I could not see whether there was anybody inside the van, other than the driver. I suspect that the large lettering was designed to reassure the public that something is being done about all this, but my experience, which I have referred to briefly today, leads me to believe that that is another game of bluff and bluster by the Government and that, in reality, they do not have the will to ensure that our borders are kept secure and that people who enter illegally are found guilty of an offence. [Interruption.]
The hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) is chuntering from the Opposition Front Bench. He might think it unusual for me to be concerned about Government policy, but I think that this is another area of Government policy that could be tightened significantly. That would be in accordance not only with public interest, but with the will of the public. In the popular mind, illegality means being against the criminal law, and if someone is guilty of a criminal offence they should be subject to the consequences.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
It is unusual for my hon. Friend to reach this stage in the presentation of any of his multifarious Bills without making some reference in depth to the European Union. Will he explain what measures other European Union countries take when people overstay or enter illegally?
Mr Chope
Without having researched that in detail, and based upon my experience as Chairman of the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, my answer is that practice varies significantly from one country to another. Some make being an illegal immigrant a criminal offence, but others do not. There is no uniform practice across the European Union—
Mr Chope
I think that responsibility for this rests solely with the United Kingdom. While wearing the hat as I have just described, I have come across a lot of evidence of organised criminal networks bringing people into our country illegally. The networks are usually based overseas and take very large sums from often very unfortunate migrants.
Once the migrants get here, they can be assured that they are here with impunity, because they will be able to lie low and will not be subject to any criminal sanctions. That gives them a perverse incentive to come to the United Kingdom rather than go to another European country where the rules are stricter and being there without authority gives rise to criminal penalties and sanctions.
Intelligence and Security Services
Julian Lewis Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Dr Huppert
It is absolutely right that we should have that debate. We have to agree it—we cannot just give carte blanche to people. I think that view is shared by everybody here. The hon. Gentleman is right. We must be balanced. None of us wants the details of exact techniques to be publicised. None the less, we do need to have the discussion about what is okay, what is not okay and where the line is drawn.
We know that the National Security Council was not even told of the scale and scope of the surveillance on our own citizens. We have heard that there were concerns about what would happen if the public knew what was happening. It was feared that it could lead to public debate and legal challenge—well, so be it. Public debate and legal challenge are an important part of the rule of law, and to avoid accountability through secrecy is simply not the solution.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous in taking interventions. A few moments ago, he said that he did not want detail to be released. The problem with the mass release of thousands of stolen documents is that nobody knows the detail before they release them and propagate them. Is that not rather different from whistleblowing on an individual error or abuse, when one is putting out there hundreds of thousands of documents that one has not even read oneself?
Dr Huppert
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that it would be irresponsible to publish hundreds of thousands of documents without having a look at them. That is why I am so glad that that is what The Guardian has explicitly not done. It has taken a responsible approach and managed to prevent that. We can imagine what could have happened if there had been a WikiLeaks-style publication. The hon. Gentleman should be concerned about the fact that a contractor was able to get hold of all the information, and that is a serious failure from the NSA and a great disgrace. If it cannot protect information to that level of security, it should be very worried. There are, I think, 850,000 people who could have had access to that information. Was the NSA certain that none of them would pass it on to a foreign power? Frankly, passing it on to The Guardian is probably about the safest thing that could have happened to it.
One of the functions of Parliament is to pass legislation and scrutinise the work of the Government. However, if we do not know what is happening, how can there be any scrutiny? We see legislation such as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 being used beyond the original intentions of the House, and that makes it impossible for Parliament to do its job. People say, “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.” I suggest that they say that to the green activists infiltrated by the police or to members of the Lawrence family. Human behaviour changes when people know that they are being watched. Is that the world in which we want to live?
There is also an economic issue. Our actions are hitting our own economic interests. The internet is a huge factor in business here—some £110 billion of GDP. It is a dynamic market, and it can move. If people are concerned about the privacy of their data here, whether their personal information or important company secrets, they will simply move where they store that information. Germany is already launching schemes to encourage businesses to go there instead, with e-mail systems that guarantee that no data will leave German boundaries while e-mails are being sent, so there is not the problem of information going overseas and coming back again to be looked at. That will hit us financially, regardless of anything else.
We must look at the balance between intelligence gathering and privacy. We need to have oversight. Although I am pleased that we are having the heads of the intelligence and security services coming to a public forum, it has been incredibly hard to get that to happen. Of course national security should not be taken lightly, but the public needs to understand what is being done in their name.
Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)
It is extremely welcome that Parliament is at last having a debate about the fact that a state employee can select on a computer any item about an individual—their address, phone number, mobile number, e-mail, passport number, credit card number or any of their log-ins to a web service—and thus access the content of their communications and details of who they communicate with, the full range of their internet use, their location and a great deal else. Of course, GCHQ is proud to insist that none of that is at all likely, because it always acts within the law—if only. Yes, the computer operator must provide a justification for the information that he is seeking, but that is not too hard when he is conveniently offered a drop-down menu to prompt his thoughts.
All such activity is supposed to be firmly controlled by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 but that Act is, I think, more about facilitating such exercises than curtailing them. RIPA is so poorly drafted—one almost wonders whether that was deliberate—and is open to such broad interpretation that it allows Government agencies such as GCHQ to do whatever they like. We are assured by the Home Office that it is concerned only with the metadata—the technical wherewithal of communications systems, rather than the documents—but the Snowden documents, as reported, tell us the truth:
“GCHQ policy is to treat it pretty much all the same whether it’s content or metadata.”
We are repeatedly given assurances that privacy is fully safeguarded, until we discover that the National Security Agency in the United States spends £250 million a year on weakening encryption. No doubt GCHQ is acting similarly on breaking commercially available security products.
The truth is, and has been for a long time, that the NSA in the States, via the Prism programme, and GCHQ in the UK, via Tempora, have acquired the capability to hoover up vast, untold quantities of personal data from the undersea cables that carry internet data on a colossal scale in and out of the UK, and to do that without any check or accountability. Does that matter? I think that it does. Tempora already allows GCHQ the capacity to collect more than 21 petabytes a day. To put that in context, it is the equivalent of sending all the data in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours. Two years ago, there were already 550 British and American analysts ploughing through the Tempora database. The balance between safeguarding personal safety and tracking down terrorism and serious crimes has unquestionably been drastically breached. The security agencies are operating under outdated law, despite the recent changes that we all know about, without a genuine public mandate.
What should be done? It was decided at the end of the previous Parliament that all Select Committees, except one, should be elected by the House, and not selected by the Whips and beholden to the party leaderships, as hitherto. The one exception was of course the Intelligence and Security Committee, which operates in a totally different way, untouched by the wave of accountability that swept through the Commons in 2009-10, in response to the revelations of the expenses scandal.
Dr Lewis
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will—I suspect that he will—enlarge on that point, but will he mention the fact that that one Committee is different from all the others, because it is the only one that has access to highly classified material? Surely, that is the relevant point.
Mr Meacher
That is perfectly true. The real issue is whether that justifies its being outside the system of accountability of the Houses of Parliament. In my submission, it does not. Safeguards might be required, but not the construction of a different type of Committee, whose Chair and members are appointed by the Prime Minister, to replace as and when he or she wishes, and which sits in private.
Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)
The hon. Gentleman has corrected the record, which is a point of debate and not of order.
Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)
No, they remain on the record to embarrass those who make them.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I genuinely congratulate my near namesake, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), not only on securing this debate but on the way in which he presented his case and the exceptionally generous way in which he handled interventions. I hope that it will not damage his credibility on the left too much if I point out how very strongly I agreed with at least one of the points that he made in response to my intervention on him.
There are three questions that I want to address. First, on which the hon. Gentleman responded, why is it so easy for junior personnel to engage in mass leaking? Secondly, is it easier than before, as he suggested, to track or spy on people? Thirdly, who should rightly be regarded as a whistleblower? That is the point that I was touching on when I intervened on him. On the first question, he is absolutely right. If these secrets are so sensitive, there is something terribly wrong with the system that allows an Army private or a junior technician access to them.
Dr Lewis
I am glad to see the hon. Gentleman endorsing what I am saying. Any system that allows tens of thousands of top secret documents to be downloaded by such junior personnel in such quantity must be at risk.
In an absolutely outstanding contribution to the debate, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood)—I do congratulate him on his measured and exceptionally well-informed contribution—referred to the whole business of Enigma and the ultra secret of world war two.
Colleagues might remember that in 1974 the book, “The Ultra Secret”, perhaps regrettably—historians are grateful—revealed the secret that, as a result of the development of the Enigma machine, we were decrypting codes during the war that people thought were unbreakable. The book was published. Its author was F. W. Winterbotham. If I remember correctly, his role was to be in charge of the signals liaison units, which comprised members of the special services who were involved in the distribution of the Enigma decrypts and who were spread around all parts of the military infrastructure that received that intelligence. In other words, they were crucially aware of the need to keep top secret material secure. As such, they had special security arrangements to prevent anything like the Snowden case and the Bradley Manning case from happening. There is a huge gap in the security arrangements for the handling of such material.
On whether it is easier than before to track and spy on people, as the hon. Member for Cambridge has suggested, in one sense, he is absolutely right. We have electronic devices that offer more ways in. In another sense, though, he is not quite right. The problem is that in the past, when we wanted to track or spy on someone, all we had to do was to get a court order to enable the interception of mail or telephone calls. Now, with so many new systems of communication, it is actually much harder to track and spy on people who ought to be tracked and spied upon, according to the process of law, because there are so many other ways to communicate.
Dr Huppert
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for some of his earlier comments. There is an interesting issue. Communications data are increasingly available to the police, but records of the locations where people had phones are now kept for a year. We can join the dots to find out exactly where somebody went. That information is available to the police and is used in many investigations. That would never have been available before. He is right that there are some safeguards; but 20 or 30 years ago, there would have been no way to say, “Three months ago, where was Dr Julian Lewis at any particular moment?”
Dr Lewis
I entirely accept that point, which was partly covered by the hon. Member for Cheltenham when he briefly referred to the need to hoover up haystacks to be able to search for the needles in them afterwards. The question is whether we then have access to the irrelevant parts of the haystack, or legally supervised targeted access to those needles in the haystack, which can be detected as a result of modern technology. This is all about the mass collection, mass storage and interrogation of mass data so collected and stored.
I now come back to the third question: who should rightly be regarded as a whistleblower? I would like to reach a point of agreement again with the hon. Member for Cambridge. In his defence of The Guardian newspaper, he said that it is precisely because The Guardian is not simply publishing everything that has fallen into its hands that it is acting responsibly. We can argue the finer points of that; he certainly has an arguable case. Where there can be no argument, however, is in the case of a person who steals the mass database and transmits it to other unauthorised individuals or organisations, or indeed newspapers, when he cannot possibly have read or in any way assessed whether the contents of that database had been properly collected or whether an abuse of the intelligence services’ powers had in fact taken place. That person is not acting responsibly, so the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson), whom I always admire, should be a little more careful before ascribing the term “brave whistleblower” to someone like Snowden.
Snowden is no more a whistleblower than someone like Julian Assange or anyone else who gets a mass of information and feels that it is right to publish it and put it into the public domain for no other reason than it is classified secret or top secret. Basically, their rationale can only be that they do not think anything should ever be classified secret or top secret. Once they admit that there is a purpose in classifying some information, and that some information ought to be kept secret, then we get into the area of who decides what should be kept secret and what should be the result of whistleblowing activities.
When I see somebody who blows the whistle on an identifiable abuse, I say, “Well done”, provided, of course, that they have used and exhausted all the right channels and were left with no alternative. But when I see someone who abuses their access to a massive database and then publishes it widely, I say that that is not whistleblowing; that is irresponsible—
National Security (The Guardian)
Julian Lewis Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Julian Smith
Finally, this debate is not an attack on the campaign to reconsider the extent of intelligence gathering and the concerns raised by the NSA, WikiLeaks and other intelligence revelations. The role of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee has only recently been strengthened.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
As a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I leave the Chamber in no doubt whatever that if I had done what The Guardian has done in relation to the classified material that we see, I have no hesitation in saying that I would expect to be charged. My hon. Friend mentioned the D notice system. Does he know whether The Guardian used or was approached under the terms of the D notices?
Julian Smith
I will address that point shortly.
I believe we have some of the best oversight in the world of our intelligence services—judicial, ministerial and parliamentary—but we are right to keep testing, keep questioning and keep challenging.
My intention today is to highlight where The Guardian has crossed the line between responsible journalism and seriously risking our national security and the lives of those who seek to protect us. If action is not taken, there will be direct results for our national security, now and in the future.
I pay tribute to our ex-colleague, Louise Mensch, who through her blog, social media and columns has ensured that this major national security issue has been kept alive throughout.
Oral Answers to Questions
Julian Lewis Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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James Brokenshire
There is understanding across government on the challenges and issues involved in protecting the police’s ability to fight crime and on the fact that a gap is emerging in this whole issue of communications data. It is important that we strike an effective balance between keeping the public safe and protecting civil liberties. That is why we are taking this issue seriously and considering it carefully—I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that the previous Labour Government did not do that. We will make proposals in due course to get this right.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Most people on both sides of the House, at least in the major parties, recognise the need for communications data to be preserved so that terrorist needles can be found in a communications haystack. Will the Minister confirm that we should be reassured by the fact that the people who preserve the communications haystack for a limited period are not the Government but the suppliers from the communications industry themselves?
Immigration Rules: Sponsors
Julian Lewis Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Harper
My understanding is that people are able to do that. I can tell from the way the hon. Lady is looking at me that there is a point behind her question, so if she will do me the courtesy of dropping me a line, I will examine the argument she is making and get back to her, rather than diverting the debate away from its central point.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
At the risk of diverting the debate for just a fraction longer, I worry a bit about this language test. I come from a third-generation immigrant family, and my grandfather to the end of his life spoke English haltingly and with a thick foreign accent. What mattered was that he was able to undertake a productive trade, and that his children and grandchildren were not cosseted by being taught in the language of the country they had left, but were properly educated in the language of the country they had joined. To have too stringent a language test is to look at the problem the wrong way round.
Justice and Security Bill [Lords]
Julian Lewis Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Steve Baker
I perhaps would not have chosen precisely the same words, but I entirely agree with my hon. Friend’s sentiments.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I am sorry to disagree with both my hon. Friends, especially as they really are my hon. Friends. That analogy breaks down because this is not MPs being elected by other MPs; rather, it is the Chair of the Committee being elected by a group of MPs who will have been chosen with the final say-so of the House of Commons. The other point I would simply make is that I do not think people who know either me or my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) would regard us as falling entirely in the Whips’ narks category.
Steve Baker
Since my hon. Friend has brought me on to this territory early, let me deal with these points now, first by saying to my right hon. and learned Friend that I well remember the month when he became Secretary of State for Defence, because it was when I graduated from initial officer training. I am very well aware of his august experience and the extent to which it exceeds my own. I am also well aware that my hon. Friend is a man of great character and integrity and personal courage. This is not really the issue, however. The issue is the institutional arrangements we put in place not necessarily to constrain my right hon. and learned Friend and my hon. Friend, but to ensure the Committee is credible both now and in future.
Steve Baker
The right hon. Lady’s question pre-empts some of my other remarks, but let me just draw her attention to what amendment 9 states:
“The Chair is to be a member of the House of Commons elected in the same way as the Chairs”
of other Committees, and:
“A person is not eligible to be elected as Chair of the ISC unless that person—
(a) has received the formal consent in writing of the Prime Minister to that person’s candidature, and
(b) is not a Minister of the Crown.”
So the Prime Minister, and the security establishment, would have the opportunity through that procedure to approve or reject a person who wished to stand for election as Chair of the Committee. That is not a perfect situation, but it is one that recognises the point the right hon. Lady makes.
Dr Julian Lewis
This is meant to be a helpful intervention. I think my hon. Friend accepts that if we are to have this Committee that is unlike any other in that it is the only Committee with access to top-secret, classified information, it is not good enough simply to say that any Member of this House, however honourable, who happens to be fortunate enough to win an election should automatically be appointed Chairman of such a Committee. Am I right that my hon. Friend acknowledges that that would be an impossible situation?
Mr Howarth
The hon. Gentleman’s intervention seems to be predicated on the view that the Committee is entirely unaccountable, but that is not the case. We produce an annual report and other reports during the course of the year, and they are debated in both this House and the other place, along with other matters we have dealt with over the year. Therefore, to that extent there is accountability. In that sense the way the Committee operates is already similar to the way Select Committees operate, and it will become more so as a result of the Bill.
However, I still think that whoever chairs the Committee has a special role and that an appropriate veto over an individual’s promotion to it has to be in the hands of the Prime Minister of the day. I have no reason to believe that the current Prime Minister, who is not a member of my party, would not perform that role properly. I also believe that no Prime Minister would promote the candidacy of someone they did not think would have the confidence of the whole House, not just that of the Committee. In that context, I think that the accountability is already there. It might be a little bit opaque in some respects, and in others it might be indirect, but it is there and it is appropriate.
Dr Julian Lewis
I would like to confine my remarks to an elaboration of a point that was made very effectively by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), who sadly is not in his place at the moment. There seems to be a conflation of two separate concepts: whether the election of the Chair directly will aid the Committee’s credibility; and whether it will aid the efficacy of its performance. For the life of me, I cannot see how the method for electing the Chair would make any difference whatsoever if, for example, the Committee was carrying out an investigation and one or other of the security agencies chose not to supply it with certain information that ought to be supplied. I would have thought that the best insurance for an agency supplying the information that should be supplied is the consequences of what would happen if it did not do so and the omission came to public attention, as it inevitably would.
Steve Baker
If the Chair is elected and enjoys the authority of the House, apart from any prime ministerial patronage or the appearance of it, he would have the authority, and not just with the agencies, but in the public sphere, to be able to tell the Prime Minister that he was dissatisfied with the information provided by a particular agency, and in that way the two mechanisms come together and authority over the agencies is increased.
Dr Lewis
I am afraid that I do not think that cuts any ice whatsoever, because one cannot be in a position to be dissatisfied with information that one has not been given and does not know exists. The suggestion, which is implicit in my hon. Friend’s intervention, that the person who was Chair at the time of the particular historical episode to which he refers—it was before my time on the Committee—would have acted in any way differently had he been elected, and that he did not act simply because he felt insufficient legitimacy to do so because he had not been directly elected, is frankly unrealistic.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker) seems to overlook the fact that changes in the Bill will massively strengthen the Committee’s position. The Committee will be able to require information to be provided, whereas previously it could only request it. That is a huge difference. The position of the House of Commons will be strengthened vis-à-vis the Committee’s membership, because previously the House could express an opinion about whether it had approved the people nominated to be members, but in fact the Prime Minister had the final say, whereas now the House will have the final say. If the House does not like the cohort of people who have been nominated, it can throw them out and the Prime Minister will have to nominate someone else.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe is focusing his attention on a really rather narrow issue, because the House of Commons will have the final say on who all the members of the Committee, at least from the House, will be, which at the moment is seven of the nine. Therefore, those members, who will themselves have been directly appointed by the House on the nomination of the Prime Minister, will then be in a very strong position to choose one of their own number to be Chair.
I will say one more thing on the matter. I do not think that the world would collapse if my hon. Friend’s amendment were successful, but we are taking a giant stride in the right direction. One thing I have found through working on the Committee is that it, probably more than any other Committee—all Select Committees like to flatter themselves for being relatively non-partisan—is totally non-partisan. Even if one wanted to be partisan, there is no one there to watch one being so, so there really is not much point. I can honestly say, as I said in an intervention at an earlier stage of the Bill’s consideration, that if anything unfortunate were to happen to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), who chairs the Committee, I would almost certainly find myself voting for the Chair, if I had the option of voting for another Committee member, on a non-party basis.
I do not think that what my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe is proposing would be earth-shatteringly damaging if it went through, but I really do not think that it is terribly necessary, and I am concerned that people would put themselves forward and say, “I wish to be in this position,” only to find that they had been vetoed, for reasons they could not be told, by the Prime Minister. That would be a coruscating experience for all concerned.
Paul Murphy
Had I been inclined to support amendments 8 to 14, my inclination would have dropped dramatically over the past half hour as a consequence of hearing the speech made by the hon. Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker). I do not think for one second that the Committee’s significance depends on the Chair. The Chair is an important member of the Committee—the first among equals. During the two years I chaired the Committee, including the period when we considered extraordinary rendition, there was certainly unanimity among the members, as the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) has just mentioned, as there is now, so the Committee had to come to a consensus.
It is preposterous to argue that whether or not the Chair had been elected would have made the slightest difference to the report on rendition or to the Committee’s eventually recommendations. That issue can be dealt with in another place and at another time, although the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), who was supposed to move the amendment—we have had an explanation of why he cannot be here—had a particular interest in rendition, but Members of the House will know that the Committee dealt with a host of other important issues affecting this country’s intelligence services.
Twenty years ago, the Committee started on a journey. Before the law was changed, there was no Committee of this House—in the Commons or the Lords—to deal with the intelligence services. Indeed, just before the inauguration of the Committee, the very existence of MI6 was denied publicly by the Government. In those 20 years there has been a dramatic shift in how the intelligence services have been made more accountable. The latest of those shifts is proposed in this Bill, which is a very good Bill in that regard. The accountability and transparency that it requires—there is obviously a limit to how much transparency one can have when dealing with the intelligence services—is something that I am sure we all welcome and support.
I support the proposal that the members of the Committee—who, by the way, are themselves subject to approval by the House of Commons and the House of Lords—will decide on who the Chairman of the Committee is to be. The Prime Minister does not do that. The Prime Minister could have a say in who the members are, but ultimately the House of Commons makes that decision. Those members will know among themselves who they feel to be the best person for the job. We have to bear it in mind that this is not a Select Committee. If it were, it could be argued that its Chair should be elected in the same way as for a Select Committee, but it is not—it is a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament. The Chair of the Committee, who is usually, and should be, a Member of this House, reports to the House annually, and a debate is also held in the other place. Having the members themselves choose the Chair of the Committee is a very significant development.
The Committee can never be the same as a Select Committee, because if it were, it would not be doing its job. It has to command the trust and the confidence of the intelligence services because of the nature of the business they deal with. The only way to do that is to have people on the Committee who are trusted not only by their colleagues here and in the House of Lords but by the three agencies, so that they can ensure that there is the fullest flow of information of highly sensitive and secret detail that the Committee can deal with. That is why it is different from other Committees. I think that the proposals in the Bill, which have been refined over the past couple of years, are such that everybody will be able to support them today.
Another matter covered in this group of amendments is the way in which the ISC is financed. Under the Bill, the Committee is no longer a statutory Committee—it becomes a Committee of Parliament. As a consequence, the Government will pay Parliament for the workings and expenses of the Committee. I fully support the Government amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) is going to discuss the remuneration of the members of the ISC—more particularly, that of its Chair. Of course, all of us who have held these positions over the years have had no remuneration. I welcome and support this development and only wish that it were retrospective so that I could claim two years’ back pay, but that is not going to happen. My hon. Friend’s amendment refers to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, which I hope will support this measure. I also hope that the Chair of the ISC will get the same remuneration as is paid to the equivalent Chairs of Select Committees: in this case, I imagine, the Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs and Defence Committees. The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) is extremely hard working in his position, and I believe that this is a right and proper thing to do.
Diana Johnson
The hon. Gentleman speaks with great experience as the former Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. However, the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee deals with far more than just the finances of the security agencies, so it is not quite the same.
Dr Julian Lewis
On that point, the hon. Lady’s response is correct. The people who advise the Intelligence and Security Committee on the finances of the security and intelligence services leave the meetings when other matters—namely, classified information—are under discussion.
Diana Johnson
That information is very helpful.
I have explained why the Opposition will not support amendment 8. Government amendment 58 relates to the money, staff, accommodation and other resources that will be made available to Parliament for the new Committee. I wonder whether the Minister can help me, because I am slightly confused about the intention of the Government with respect to the support that will be provided to the ISC. In his response, will he set out how he expects the secretariat to the ISC to be provided? In Committee, we discussed a proposal suggested by the membership of the ISC for a non-departmental public body to be established to provide secretarial support. That does not appear to be what the Government are doing. Will he therefore explain what will happen?
Mr Clarke
I encounter many people making bids for resources for their particular, extremely important, activities. My right hon. Friends at the Treasury are receiving a very large number of these bids all the time. I have had some experience of public spending, and I can tell the House that it is not wise to engage in negotiations across the Floor of the House—it is certainly not wise for a non-Treasury Minister to do so. For this purpose, in this debate, given those present, I think we can agree that it is the Government’s intention that this Committee should be properly resourced to do its job, which is why we are taking a power to supplement Parliament’s financing of the Committee. Obviously, the Government have the right to query and test the figures that are put to them, and there are ways in which this can eventually be negotiated.
Dr Lewis
I hope not to get bogged down. I wish to assist our Front-Bench team by pointing out that the Intelligence and Security Committee has eight staff, whereas the detainee inquiry, which looked at only one issue, had 14 staff and the Committee on Standards in Public Life has 12 staff. As the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) pointed out, the Government’s own impact assessment suggested that to do what is being required of us we would need a budget of £1.3 million, which compares with the existing budget of £750,000. At the moment only £850,000 is being offered, and if the gap is not bridged, this whole reform will be a waste of time.
Mr Clarke
I can say only that I, like my right hon. and hon. Friends, am fully aware of the Committee’s views on the amount of funding that it will require. Yet again, I take note of my hon. Friend’s points on the matter, but I repeat that there is not much point in my standing here carrying out a negotiation with him or any other member of the Committee about the figure we arrive at. As someone who has been at the Treasury, I think that the Government must combine providing the right resources, which are undoubtedly going to be more than the Committee has had in the past, with doing a bit of negotiating about what is the necessary cost. Report stage is not the place to resolve the final figure.
Similarly, the status and nature of the Committee will not be resolved finally by statute or by debate on the Floor of the House. A long discussion has been going on to make sure that the Committee has the right status and structure to do its job effectively, and I think we are very near to reaching a successful agreement between the Government, the Opposition, the House authorities in both Houses of Parliament and the current members of the Intelligence and Security Committee on what its status should be. I am told that we still have to have further discussions with the House of Commons Commission and the House Committee in the House of Lords, but I think everybody is becoming satisfied that we are resolving that matter. We are also resolving the question of the accommodation, which probably will have to be on the Government’s estate rather than the parliamentary estate, for security reasons. I will go into more details if hon. Members wish, but I realise that we still have quite a lot of the Bill to deal with. Unless hon. Members are particularly interested in knowing the precise current status of these discussions, I hope I may take it that the House is reasonably satisfied that all parties are going to reach a satisfactory conclusion. I assure the House that the Government have been anxious throughout to make this Committee powerful, properly resourced and as much of a parliamentary body—a body that is accountable and resembles the Select Committees of the House in every way possible—as it can be. I think that soon this will all be resolved.
I shall now deal with amendment (a), tabled by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), although she anticipated my reply. Government amendment 58 is required in order to give us the necessary authority to make the financial contributions that we are going to be arguing about. Amendment (a) seeks to oblige the Government—or at least expressly to empower them—to make an additional amount available for the payment of Committee members. That is not necessary, nor, in my opinion and that of the Government, is it wise to start putting the matter of the payment of members of Select Committees or parliamentary Committees into statute, or implicating the Government directly in that. The payment of members of this Committee, the Chairman of this Committee and members of Select Committees is a matter for the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority—from every point of view, it is best left there. Where the Government have to initiate all this, it is a feature of all Governments, of all political complexions, that they can get very politically embarrassed on questions about the remuneration of any Member of either House. So a process that leaves the matter with IPSA and the House of Commons is preferable to the hon. Lady’s amendment.
Finally, I shall touch on the spirit of political debate we have had on the question of whether the Chairman should be elected, and again I must say that the Wright Committee produced a splendid report. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) first proposed this, but he is not able to be here because he is serving on his Banking Commission, as we all realise. We worked together, when we were in opposition, with my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who is now the Government Chief Whip, on a thing called the democracy taskforce, advocating the election of Chairman of Select Committees and producing proposals that were remarkably close to those of the Wright Committee. I certainly start on the same basis as my colleagues who have been drawn to this part of the debate, but we have heard all the arguments why, in this particular case, the proposal does not work. We are already making the whole thing approved by Parliament. No longer will the Prime Minister appoint the Chairman; the Chairman will be elected by those who know—or will know—him best: members of the ISC.
Dr Julian Lewis
I accept the validity of what my hon. Friend says, but the problem is that in that formulation the ISC was trying to do away with a similar problem with the Government’s wording, which suggests that all information that the ISC receives in private is subject to these restrictions. The whole point of what we are trying to say is that it should apply only to classified or sensitive information that we receive in private. Other information that we receive in private, such as from victims of the 7/7 bombing, should not be restricted in that way. Even though my hon. Friend makes a valid point against the wording that we have offered, the same point still applies to the Government’s wording.
James Brokenshire
My hon. Friend, in his customary way, has highlighted the genuine challenges that both the Government and ISC members have had in seeking to frame legislation, which can be a challenging mechanism within which to express matters effectively. He rightly points out the evidence given by the families of the victims of 7/7 and those who were sadly caught up in that terrible event. There have also been discussions of the evidence taken from communication service providers during the ISC’s recent inquiry into communications data, including whether the information provided was sensitive. It is a challenge at times to analyse evidence from third parties to decide whether evidence is sensitive and thus not suitable for disclosure. Sometimes that is clear, but sometimes it is not.
Dr Julian Lewis
Does the Minister agree that this is a similar dilemma to the one we faced on the question of publicity? The Opposition’s amendment might go too far, but we on the Committee feel that what the Government propose does too little. It protects witnesses against their evidence being used against them, but falls short—as the Minister seems to be conceding—of the protection the Committee would have if it were a Select Committee. Will he undertake to come back with something else at a later stage—perhaps in the other place—that would be a better compromise between those two positions?
James Brokenshire
I fully respect what my hon. Friend has said. We have given careful consideration, at length, to the statutory protections afforded to the ISC through this Bill. He will remember the debates we had in Committee about issues under the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act, along with a number of other statutory provisions, which we believed needed to be addressed to afford the ISC a number of additional protections. Although I very much hear what he says, the Government believe that we have taken this as far as we can through our amendments—and within the remit of article 6 of the ECHR, for example—to afford those protections and frame the provisions. I note the concern he has raised; all I would say is that the Government have taken some additional steps—on things that the existing Committee does not currently have—in how the Bill is framed to move the Committee as close as we can, within the framework of law, to provide the relevant protections.
As members of the ISC who are here today will recognise, consideration was given to how one might approach the issue of parliamentary privilege. Indeed, there was a lengthy debate in the other place on that issue. There is a broad recognition that trying to define parliamentary privilege in statute would open a whole new array of issues. Indeed, I do not think this House would welcome an attempt to frame the privileges that reside in this place by way of an Act of Parliament, which might be subject to further litigation and challenge, which not only might have an effect simply on the ISC but could have a limiting effect on parliamentary privilege for broader issues in this House. When considering this issue, everyone involved in the examination of the Bill thought that that would be a very unfortunate step to take. Therefore, the Government have thereafter sought to approach the issue by framing matters within existing legislative frameworks.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. There are four Members trying to catch my eye on this set of amendments and the knife falls at 4 o’clock, so I ask Members to be conscious of the time that they take to make their case in order to allow the Minister to respond.
Dr Julian Lewis
I shall be brief. On amendment 73, in the light of the undertaking given by the Minister to my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) that the publication issues will be addressed in the memorandum of understanding, I am say on behalf of colleagues that we do not propose to press that amendment.
On the question of taking evidence on oath, I think I speak for colleagues on the Committee in saying that we are entirely happy with what the Government propose. On the use of the word “voluntary”, I can only re-emphasise what has been said by many other colleagues. The Minister endeavoured to explain to the House why this applies only to that part of our duties that relate to operational matters. All I can say to him and to the Government is that we will be spending an awful lot of our time trying to fend off critics who, wilfully or otherwise, choose to interpret the presence of the word “voluntarily” on the face of the Bill as implying that we do not have the ability to force the agencies to comply with our requests, when in most cases we do. There must be a simpler and less emotive term that can be used to express the same purpose, without leaving us open to such unjustified criticism.
On the question of privilege, I am still concerned, as are the Opposition, that sufficient measures have not been taken to empower the Committee and protect the Committee to anything like the same extent. For example, when the Committee discusses people’s possible involvement in serious criminal activity, could we end up in a situation in which some of our proceedings that involve statements —not from witnesses, but from Committee members—that in the ordinary course of events might be regarded as defamatory may result in court proceedings being taken against members in a way that would not be possible with members of a Select Committee in analogous circumstances? If we could end up in such a situation, the Government need to consider that problem very seriously indeed and do something about it at a later stage. I hope that the Minister will refer to that in his closing remarks.
On the question of pre-appointment hearings, I do not believe that the Committee has taken a corporate view as such, but one point must be made, and made strongly: this would add to the work load of the Committee’s staff. The Committee, as has been made crystal clear today, is already grotesquely understaffed by comparison with comparable committees and organisations in this country and in Europe. Therefore, were we to take on that further burden, we would definitely need better proposals for resourcing it than those that are currently ready.
The Opposition are quite right to resist amendment 71, because individual complaints against the agencies, such as that involving Binyam Mohamed, are not the responsibility of the ISC; they fall within the statutory remit of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. That is the correct body to deal with such matters.
Finally, on the question of the Osmotherly rules, I am glad that the matter will be dealt with one way or another. We would prefer it to be set out in the Bill, but otherwise in the memorandum of understanding, because the ISC frequently needs access to the papers of a previous Administration, for example, or has to deal with matters that are sub judice, and we cannot row backwards from that situation. Subject to those comments, we are very pleased with the progress the Bill has made thus far.
Caroline Lucas
Amendment 71 seeks to provide some form of recourse for people who have been defamed by the UK security services and to ensure that part of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s remit is to investigate such claims and, where necessary, ensure that they are corrected. I listened with interest to what the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) said about this not necessarily being the right forum. I am happy to be advised on that, but right now it feels that there is no appropriate forum. The situation of Shaker Aamer, for example, which I will set out in more detail shortly, demonstrates that. If the hon. Gentleman can enlighten me on how we can make existing forums work more effectively, for example in this case, I would be very interested to hear what he has to say.
The ability of the security services effectively to say what they like about anyone, often resulting in serious consequences for the individual concerned, is at present largely unchecked. As John Cooper QC said in a legal opinion on precisely that issue, the security services are “presently allowed to literally say what they will to achieve their own ends, whether or not those ends are legal, democratic or in accordance with the rule of law. In addition to this, those who indulge in these activities are completely unaccountable to the citizen, to the Government, and even to a quasi-regulator or body charged with their oversight, such as the ISC. What is more, the victims of such defamation are likely to be the most vulnerable individuals, most likely detained under the most restrictive of circumstances. In essence, they are prisoners defamed by their controllers and captors. That is neither right, nor acceptable.”
I want to give a real-life example to help illustrate why I believe that this is so important. British resident Shaker Aamer, whose wife and children are British citizens and live in south London, has been held in Guantanamo for more than 11 years, despite having been cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama Administrations. The Foreign Secretary has raised the case with the US on several occasions, and the Foreign Office has made it clear that
“The government remains committed to securing Mr Aamer’s release and return to the UK.”
Given that the US has cleared him for release, a complicated process including multiple federal agencies, and the UK Government have made it clear that they want him to come home, one cannot help asking why Mr Aamer remains detained in Guantanamo, never having been charged or tried for any crimes. The conclusion that his US lawyer has reached is that Britain’s intelligence agencies have been defaming Mr Aamer to the US, passing on false information and accusing him of extremism, and that is what is holding up his release.
Mr Aamer is being deprived of his liberty on the basis of lies being told about him that he is unable to challenge. He has therefore begun defamation action against the security services—action that could be pushed into a secret court under part 2 of the Bill, leaving him once again unable to confront his accusers or to challenge the evidence used by the Government against him. I would argue that, at the very least, it is important that a duty be placed on the Intelligence and Security Committee fully to investigate such claims. That would not be a solution in itself, but it could provide some small measure of recourse for those such as Mr Aamer who find themselves in the gravest of positions as a result of information passed behind their back.
I will be very happy to hear if there are other ways of addressing this problem, but right now the advice that I am receiving from some of the legal people involved in the case is that they are not aware of any measure that would do so.
Caroline Lucas
I am not convinced that the Committee would be acting in a quasi-judicial role; I would share the right hon. Gentleman’s reservations were that to be so. I am honestly searching for a solution to the problem, and perhaps this is not the right one. However, I want to put on record the real concern that exists about the situation that Shaker Aamer finds himself in. If nothing else, I hope that if this is not the right route to take, Government Members will direct me towards the appropriate measures, because this case has been going on for very many years.
Dr Julian Lewis
I wish to be helpful to the hon. Lady, and I think that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal is the body that she has in mind. All these tribunals, including those for communications issues and for complaints such as this one, are headed up by senior judges. I think she would find that they are a much more appropriate route. However, it is obviously very interesting to hear what she has to say about these worrying cases.
Caroline Lucas
In the interests of time, I will leave the matter there and pursue it via other avenues. I am grateful for the opportunity to have aired this really important case.
Dr Julian Lewis
I will not go down the route that has so far been followed in this Third Reading debate, other than to observe that we must never forget that we are talking about civil cases, not criminal cases. They are not cases affecting people’s life and liberty; they are cases in which people, sometimes extremely unsavoury people with links to extremely dangerous organisations, are walking away with very large sums of public money. That is not a situation that can be allowed to continue. If the Opposition, in their heart, did not know that that was true, they would divide the House tonight, but they are not going to do so.
Instead, I will concentrate briefly on part 1, which strengthens the Intelligence and Security Committee. I believe that it was no coincidence that part 1 was added to the Bill, because there are two distinct and separate elements to the Bill. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) said, in what I must say was a masterly exposition of his position and, I think, that of most thoughtful people on this side of the argument about closed material proceedings, the consideration is not that there is an ideal answer, or even a satisfactory answer, but that all we can do is choose the least worst answer. To make that least worst answer to the problem more palatable, the strengthening of the ISC was added to the Bill.
I make no apology to the Minister for coming back to something that I, and others, raised quite strongly on Report: if the ISC is indeed to be strengthened, it must receive the resources it needs to carry out that strengthened and increased role. For those who did not hear me say it earlier, I remind the House that the ISC has only eight members of staff, and it has to pursue a number of inquiries and investigations every year, as well as its major annual report. That compares very unfavourably with the staff support for other Committees and inquiries, such as the 14 staff members for the detainee inquiry, which had only one specific issue to investigate, and the 12 staff members for the Committee on Standards in Public Life.
The ISC is currently funded to the tune of £750,000 a year. In the impact assessment published with the Bill, the Government cited a revised figure of £1.3 million that reflected their estimation of what the ISC would need to carry out the extra duties that are being placed on it in order to reassure the public that proper scrutiny is being carried out. The figure that is actually being offered is £850,000—an increase of just over one seventh on the existing budget. This would continue to leave the ISC worse off than all its international counterparts and worse off than the bodies that I listed. This is our last opportunity publicly to press the Government to commit to a substantive increase in resources. I hope that the Minister will confirm that the Government’s own published impact assessment will not be discarded when it is convenient to do so once this difficult Bill has been enacted.
I conclude—earlier than I would have liked, but I feel that I must—with a single observation. Everybody agrees that the contribution made to the evolution of this Bill by the Members of the upper House has been very considerable. Who can seriously maintain that that sort of expertise would be available to people on either side of the argument if we had undermined, restructured and, in effect, destroyed the upper House in the way that was so irresponsibly proposed? If this Bill ends up being better when it gets on to the statute book than it was when initially proposed, that will be in large measure due to the improvements made in another place. We therefore have reason to be grateful that the other place is available, and will remain so in the indefinite future, to assist us in the development of controversial and complex legislation such as this Bill.
Oral Answers to Questions
Julian Lewis Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Browne
I have fond memories of Enfield, Southgate from when I stood, unsuccessfully, in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. That gave me extra reason to be pleased to present the Tilley award to Enfield, which was fitting recognition for all the hard work that has taken place in his borough.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Was the Minister as pleased as I was to read in The Daily Telegraph on 3 December 2012 the following quote from a Government Minister:
“New measures are planned to cut the number of criminals who carry knives”?
Is this a welcome sign that we now have a Government who are willing to make the punishment fit the crime?
Abu Qatada
Julian Lewis Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mrs May
I think we have had this conversation before, or a very similar one, and I repeat what I have always said: it is my intention to do everything in the Government’s power to deport Abu Qatada within the rule of law. It is important that Ministers standing at this Dispatch Box commit themselves to operating within the rule of law.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Do special circumstances apply in this case, or is a judgment of this sort sending a signal to any terrorist, on the run for crimes committed in any country that may not have a judicial system fully recognised as right up there with western standards, that they just have to make a beeline for the United Kingdom and they are safe, because nobody can deport them?
Mrs May
Judgments at the European Court have been making it harder to deport foreign nationals who are terrorist suspects or criminals, but I do not believe that this sends the message that my hon. Friend believes it does. There are some very particular aspects of this case. A trial in absentia took place regarding Abu Qatada, and evidence was allegedly obtained from mistreatment or torture, given by others in that trial in absentia. So there are particular aspects that would not read across to other cases, but that is precisely why I think it was right that we did not risk losing our deportation with assurances, which we could have, had we appealed to the European Court. There are other terror suspects whom we will be able to deport under our deportation with assurances that will not be affected by this judgment, but could have been affected by a judgment by the European Court to overturn those assurances.
Transparency in UK Company Supply Chains (Eradication of Slavery) Bill
Julian Lewis Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) on his speech and on taking the Bill forward. I am delighted and proud to be one of the 11 sponsors from five parties, including no fewer than three colleagues who are all named Jim—I am not quite sure of the significance, but I felt that it was worth placing that on the record.
I was first recruited to this admirable cause by the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) when she brought in a ten-minute rule Bill along the same lines, and it was then taken up by the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk in his excellent Bill before us today. I know that he, like me, will be disappointed if it does not proceed to Committee, but it has been given an airing today, as he rightly said, and I am sure that we are all grateful to the Government for having made certain that that would happen.
There was some confusion over the question of human trafficking in relation to the Bill. Human trafficking is certainly one of the concerns covered, but it is neither the Bill’s exclusive focus, nor even its main focus. The main focus of the Bill, as became apparent in the hon. Gentleman’s speech, was brought out at yesterday evening’s reception, which I was pleased to attend. We heard some horrifying tales about what actually goes on overseas in the unsupervised chain of production for many products we see on supermarket shelves, often without the knowledge of not only consumers, but the companies selling the goods. It is therefore also in the interests of the companies and their reputations that they should make an effort to investigate the chain of production for the products they sell so that no one would be tempted to go around marking them on their shelves as having been contaminated by the ruthless exploitation of child labour or that of other impoverished people.
As the hon. Gentleman said, the Bill has a light touch. It would affect only very large companies, companies that have the resources to carry out the sorts of examinations and checks that would assure them and their consumers that the goods being sold had not been created as a result of an unendurable chain of human suffering. I think that I am right in saying that BP is an example of a major company that, although very tough-minded, has nevertheless seen it as appropriate to adopt such measures. If BP can adopt such measures, that sets a good example for other large companies to do likewise.
Dr Lewis
I will not give way, for a reason I am just about to explain.
While talking of setting good examples, I would like to say that there are times for long speeches and times for short speeches. This is a time for short speeches. I look to hon. Members on the Back Benches and on both Front Benches to follow my good example and make short speeches so that this worthy Bill can proceed as it should to Committee.
Family Migration
Julian Lewis Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Mrs May
In relation to the right hon. Lady’s first point, we have made it clear that there is an income threshold for people who want to bring a spouse, a partner or a child to the UK. On her second point, which was on dependent relatives, we are tightening up the system, but making it clear that it may be possible to bring in an elderly dependant who requires a degree of care that is not available to them in the country in which they live. In such circumstances, it must be shown that they will not be a burden on the state and that the personal care can be provided by the family.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
What will be the effect of the package on asylum seekers who come without their spouse or children? In particular, some asylum seekers fail to get asylum but cannot, for one reason or another, be sent back. There are also genuine asylum seekers to whom we are happy to grant asylum. Will they be able to bring their families to join them?
Mrs May
Asylum seekers will have the same rights to apply to be here in the UK as they have currently. The package is for those who want to bring non-EU people as spousal partners; it does not affect people who are here genuinely as asylum seekers and who have been given the protection of this country.