Airports: Expansion

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

Some would define it by when the sun shines, but I am certainly not going to say that. I think we are quite clear when we talk about the summer period: often it is when noble Lords enjoy their Recess.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, on a slightly different angle, I understand that Heathrow has increased its capacity by spacing aircraft by time, not by distance. Is this practice being extended to Gatwick and Stansted?

Immigration Bill

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 241A in my name. At the end of the debate at Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, responded extensively to a wide range of questions and comments. One of them, brought up by me and a number of other noble Lords, was about the fact that we have so little information in this area. In his response, the Minister read off a whole lot of evidence and research that the Government had possession of. I was unsatisfied by that, because most of the information did not help to determine an evidence-based policy towards migration, particularly the illegal migrants who are in the country. I therefore set myself a challenge: if I was making a decision, as a Minister, on the basis of evidence, what would I want to know? If, in my business life, I was looking at market research, what would I try to determine? I then asked myself if it was possible to determine them, because that is clearly the second stage of this. I have put in the amendment the sort of information that I would want to know if I was a Minister or Secretary of State making decisions about how I approached this subject. Illegal migrants in the country are clearly a problem: no one denies that. If they are here illegally they should not be here, and we should be able to take action. I have a list of eight or 10 things that I would want to see. I will be interested in the Minister’s response in terms of actually finding those things out. Are they, indeed, the sort of things they should know?

The second question is: is it possible to know about and explore something that is an illegal activity? There have been studies of the number of illegal migrants in the UK but I understand that the last major one—maybe by the LSE—was in 2009. It estimated that there were somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 in the UK. There is quite a large margin of error between the minimum and maximum numbers in that estimate. Is it possible to measure illegal activities? I expect that noble Lords are aware that in May 2014 the Office for National Statistics started to include in GDP figures the amount of GDP generated by illegal drugs and prostitution. Prostitution is not strictly illegal, but in terms of how it is carried out it is broadly seen as an illegal activity and therefore had not been brought into GDP before. The total GDP for those two activities was about £12 billion; more or less 50%, or £6 billion, related to illegal drugs, and approximately the same figure related to prostitution. It is therefore possible to estimate those types of figures with a reasonable standard error, if not with certainty.

The techniques that have been used to measure illegal migration are the Delphi method, the capture-recapture method and the residual method, which has been used to make these estimates in the United States. I am not for a minute saying that this is an easy or totally accurate exercise, but for decisions around such important areas as this, which we all want to solve, we should spend a little more resource and time moving away from rhetoric and into understanding what is going on. By doing so, we might have a lot better decisions about migration management, and there might be legislation that we can all agree on, rather than taking rather normative views.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. In fact, I am amazed to hear that this loophole exists. We are now under considerable threat from terrorism. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that people of wealth are not necessarily any less likely to be objects of suspicion than others, but he rather implied that only people of wealth would have access to these means of arriving in Britain. That is simply not true. Let us get away from the idea that terrorism needs a lot of money. Noble Lords will remember that the post mortem on 9/11 worked out that the total cost of doing the whole of 9/11 was lightly less than $250,000. The idea that money is any constraint on people who wish to get into this country by a means that does not involve a check is not valid. I have been arguing for years in your Lordships’ House that there should be proper entry and exit checks. We have been immensely dilatory about them. It is very late in the day because now we are under real threat and it is essential that the Government give a positive answer to this.

The details are very easy to work out. The law states that anybody landing has to land somewhere where there is a place to check them and, if that adds to the cost, so be it. If it is an emergency landing of some sort, they have to signal it, which they would have to do anyway—and all aircraft have radios—and would be required to remain there until the police were alerted and went to meet the aircraft. It is an essential matter to stop this loophole, and I hope the Government will immediately say that they will draft the necessary regulations to support the implementation of the noble Lord’s amendment.

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[Lord Marlesford]

On the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, how can the Home Office argue that there are no resources? It is absurd. It may not be mega-bucks to use private planes, but it is quite expensive. To charge a cost for someone to be at the landing place to check the person is absurd, given the present terrorist situation and the fact that all the indicators say that the terror alert is very high. Look at it another way. We do not hesitate to have police cars, probably with two police people in them, checking that people are not going 40 miles an hour in a 30 mile-an-hour limit, which they should not be doing, but the resource is there. They are the real resources. It is inexcusable not to be following up what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said. The Minister says in triumph, “We have now introduced exit checks”, but it is a real disgrace that the Government had not done so long ago, certainly at the time of 9/11.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

On that last point, I do not know that one can blame just this Government, but I accept the noble Lord’s point on exit checks. They are a useful procedure to have. I believe that we had them in the past. We reintroduced them. Nobody is saying, and I certainly did not say, that the reason we do not have permanent Border Force personnel at every single general aviation airfield is simply a matter of cost. The Border Force has 7,700 members, I think. If we had someone permanently at every single general aviation airfield, we could use the whole of the Border Force on that. It is a question of value for money. We are not sitting there doing nothing. As I tried to explain, under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, we are extending the powers so that advance passenger information can be enforced. It is an intelligence-led procedure. We do not have Border Force people sitting for weeks on end with no passengers arriving from abroad. We try to do it in a more proportionate and value-for-money way.

[Lord Marlesford]

I shall ask the Minister a very straightforward question. How is it that, when I was pressing for exit checks, I was constantly told, “We do it by intelligence? We do not need to do it regularly”, but it is now being done regularly? Does the Home Office not understand that we are in a much more dangerous position than we were? Will it wake up please?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The Home Office understands that because it takes advice from the law enforcement agencies. Of course, we also take advice from my noble friend. It is not true to say that the Home Office does not recognise the security situation. In fact, the Home Secretary regards it as her highest priority.

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Moved by

[Lord Marlesford]

241: After Clause 46, insert the following new Clause—
“Obligation to provide information on passports
(1) A condition of the issue of a new passport to, or the renewal of a passport of a British citizen who was either born outside the United Kingdom or who was not a British citizen at birth by Her Majesty’s Passport Office is that the citizen supplies details of their citizenship of other countries and of passports held relating to any such status at the time of application.
(2) A person holding a passport issued or renewed in accordance with subsection (1) must supply that Office with information regarding any acquisition or loss of citizenship of another country within one month of such a change.
(3) Information gathered by Her Majesty’s Passport Office for the purposes of subsections (1) and (2) shall be made available—
(a) to the Home Secretary for consideration as part of a decision made under section 40(4A) of the British Nationality Act 1981;(b) to immigration officers for consideration when undertaking their duties.”

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, I do not apologise for raising yet again the simple point that it is necessary and urgent that the Government should arrange to have details of passports that British passport-holders hold other than British passports. I have nothing against people having as many passports as they want. There are lots of reasons why they may, such as sentimental family connections, birth connections or travel connections. There were days when you had to have two passports if you went to China because the Americans did not like a chop from China. There were days when you could not go to certain Arab countries if there was a chop from Israel. The Israelis gave up the chop, so it was made less necessary. All I am saying is that it is essential that the Government should be aware, so that when somebody produces their passport at the airport, puts it on the scanner—that is a big technical advance now being implemented—and the immigration officer sees the readout, he or she should also know what other passports that person has. That is all I am asking. It is very simple.

The Government have resisted and resisted this. I am afraid that it has become a bit of a Home Office game of “Yes Minister”. It is rather like my firearms register, which took 10 years to get accepted. The electronic register of all firearms is now in extremely good working order and very effective, but if I had not persisted for what turned out to be 10 years it would not be there.

I now ask for something pre-emptive. In this awful world we live in, we have to think about what can go wrong. In an earlier debate somebody, I think the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, gave the example of somebody who had skipped out on bail, apparently with ease. I was put on to the point of needing to know about other passports six years ago by people from the security world who said they had great difficulty and gave an example of madrassahs in Pakistan. Plenty of people—and this is no criticism of the situation—have Pakistani and British passports. They would use their British passport to go in and out of the UK and get up to mischief using the other one. When they came back, people would have no idea where else they might have been or what they might have done. It made the whole scrutiny process extremely difficult. The Home Office has got to learn to identify problems and think of the answers.

My right honourable friend the Prime Minister produced a very interesting example in the last day or two which was well worth saying. If we were to leave Europe, the arrangements between France and Britain for policing people coming into Britain from France might be in danger of falling down and being abolished. The camps might then appear in Folkestone or somewhere in southern England. That would not be acceptable, but it is perfectly easy to deal with. In the case of people coming by ferry, the answer is simple. If the French were to say that we could no longer have British immigration officers on their territory—and I cannot believe they would—we would put them on the ships and not allow people to disembark without having been checked. If they were found unsatisfactory they could stay on the ship and go back again. There are already perfectly good arrangements for airlines. The Prime Minister was right to draw attention to this possibility. It would be tiresome if they overturned a very good system which has existed for three or four years. When I was on the EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee, we visited Calais and saw the policing arrangements. We have all seen them when we travel between the continent and Britain. It is a perfectly satisfactory arrangement: the French police are in the station in London and the British in the station in France.

All I am doing in this amendment is saying that it should be required that those who have other passports notify the British passport authority. When I raised this in an earlier debate, the response was that when somebody applies for a passport they do have to notify about other passports they hold. I could read it from Hansard but I will not bother because the noble Lord has read it himself. The difference is that it is not on the record: it is merely looked at, at the time. That is an incredible gap. Maybe the Minister will be able to tell me that if people have applied for a new British passport—or renewed one—and have shown, declared or revealed that they also have a non-British one, that is now on the record and shows on the screen when their passports are scanned on arrival in Britain. I do not think he will be able to tell me that it is, but I would be delighted if he could. It is now necessary to extend the system so that all passports held by British people have on the record details of other passports held. I beg to move.

[Lord Swinfen (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of Lord Marlesford. I have relatives with dual Australian and British citizenship. Going in and out of Australia, they use their Australian passports; going in and out of Britain, they use their British ones. Even when flying from one to the other, they change their passports over because it is much quicker for them to get through immigration in both countries by using the passport of the country in which they land. However, there is then no record of the journey in the other passport. The passports of both countries should have a note that they have dual citizenship and, possibly, give the passport number of the other country. My noble friend’s suggestion is eminently sensible.

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[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I shall turn the question round. If you ask any law enforcement agency if it would like some information, it will always say yes. The question is whether it is nice to have something or it is an essential tool, and that is the advice that we have received at the moment.

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, I am afraid that my noble friend has reinforced my argument, by indicating that the information is already being collected and it is only a matter of having it on the same record as the passport record. It would obviously be useful to know, once you know that somebody has another passport, when they are entering or leaving the UK on the other passport, which will often be screened. If it showed that that person had a British passport as well, that might well be a clue and be useful. But the fact is that they are collecting information and then not using it; that is my complaint. I shall withdraw the amendment, but I will come back to it on Report, when we can have a proper debate.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I must correct the noble Lord on one thing. The Passport Office collects information for foreign passport holders when they apply for a British passport. What it does not do is to maintain it consistently through life; for example, it does not keep up-to-date addresses, and things like that. What I was saying was that, for the information that it does collect, on application and renewal only, it will attempt to make available throughout the other law enforcement agencies. But it does not collect information across dual nationalities, as the noble Lord would want, except when someone applies or renews a British passport.

[Lord Marlesford]

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 241 withdrawn.

Immigration Bill

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, anyone who went to any of the events connected with Holocaust Memorial Day just a few days ago will know that people said in 1945, “Never again”. Then we had serious tragedies and genocides in Bosnia, South Sudan and elsewhere. We keep saying that it must never happen again but it still does. I found the arguments put by the three Members of the Committee who have spoken to the amendment very powerful. They are in the spirit of the commitments made on Holocaust Memorial Day—“Never again”. They are saying that because it is still happening we have to do something about the victims. I very much support the amendment.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, the Government should be rather ashamed that this debate is necessary. It has taken the whole consideration of the Bill on to a different plane from all the other amendments that I have listened to. It is so terrible that so-called diplomacy should be unable to do what is right. I have been deeply shocked that the Government, in being asked to give priority to Christians among the 20,000 Syrians who we are to admit during this Parliament as refugees, have said that they cannot do so because they cannot discriminate. The whole concept of refugees and asylum is discrimination. It is giving succour to those who need succour. I will go no further except to say that if the amendment were to come back to the House at Report and the Government resist it, they would be overwhelmingly and humiliatingly defeated.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, apart from all the powerful arguments of support that have been put forward, the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, is one that we must all take particularly seriously. No one in this House has put their own life more on the line on issues of this kind than she has, and she has consistently done that with great courage. When she comes to us and says, “Please take this one step that would help, in terms of all that I have experienced”, we must take that seriously. I also feel very deeply that there is a real crisis in credibility with populations across the world. Governments speak with great rhetoric about these issues, but sometimes fail to provide the practical evidence that that rhetoric adds up to anything. Here is a chance to demonstrate that we mean what we say.

Islam: Extremism

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I totally agree with the noble Lord that any source of funding that seeks to divide or disrupt what we have here in the United Kingdom should be looked upon, and the full force of the law for anyone seeking to create such divisions will be imposed. The noble Lord mentioned the review by the Charities Commission. That is very much factored into the review that is currently being carried out and I am speaking to colleagues in the Cabinet Office very closely on this subject.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, what are the Government proposing to do about the Muslim Brotherhood, considering that the report that the Government commissioned, which was published in December, concludes with the words:

“Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security”?

Will the Government at least arrange for a debate in your Lordships’ House on the matter?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

The issue of a debate is very much for the usual channels. If my noble friend wishes to table such a debate, it will of course be taken forward in the normal way. On the issue of the Muslim Brotherhood, he is of course quite right: the Government published their findings in the review. The whole issue around the Muslim Brotherhood is something that the Government are watching very closely.

Identity Documentation

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I am basically on the same side as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on this matter. However, I approach it from a slightly different point of view. The key words in the Motion are,

“assuring the identity of individuals”.

Why is this Motion so opportune and sensible at the moment? It is because the Government of this country are faced with a huge challenge to their most basic responsibility: to assure the safety of individuals. That is of course a challenge faced by all EU Governments. The threat of Islamist terrorism, although quite different, is as great as that which the West faced during the Cold War, and certainly far greater than that which the UK faced during the Irish Troubles. This is a moment when the acceptance of the balance between privacy and national security has shifted, and must shift, dramatically.

“Identity documentation” is no longer the key phrase; rather, it is “identity verification”. There has been a tendency to assume that the value of identity documents, whether passports, driving licences or ID cards, can be enhanced by the inclusion in them of biometric data. Indeed, that may be the case in the majority of instances. Where it really matters, though, in serious crime and above all in terrorism, it is a dangerous illusion. For the sophisticated criminal or terrorist, it is not a problem to replace on any document the biometrics of the legitimate holder with those of the person who is carrying the document. The biometrics will match so that when you produce the document, yes, it matches and you are who you say you are, but you will not be.

The only secure method of identification is for the biometrics of the person to whom an identity document has been issued to be matched online with biometrics stored centrally at the time of issue. For that, what we need is not a secure document but merely a secure number. What is urgently needed in the UK is the abolition—the abandonment—of the chaotic multiplicity of identity numbers and the introduction of a single identity number. This should be used for passports, national insurance and tax, driving licences and other state permits, as well as for the National Health Service. It would of course be the primary number used for the security, police and prison services, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said. It would be possible for the standard number that everybody had to have an added prefix, or something added on after it, to separate it according to its use, and of course to build in all the necessary safeguards so that access to the fundamental data could be restricted according to the authorisation of the person applying to get the information, so it would all be stored and very safe.

Over the years I have asked Parliamentary Questions on what I have just described as the chaos, and, frankly, I have had the most absurd answers. With regard to travel documents, the Government still lack records of what other passports a British passport holder possesses. Not surprisingly, we have had the dangerous absurdity in increasingly numerous cases of terrorist suspects on bail skipping out of the country, either because they have failed to surrender their passports or because they have had second or third passports that no one knew about. I am putting down an amendment to the Immigration Bill once again, for the third time, to deal with this. It should of course be standard practice to cancel any passport electronically so that the actual document is unusable.

The Government do not even know how many national insurance numbers there are in use and say that it would be too expensive to find out. Non-British nationals can obtain our national insurance numbers even if they only have time-limited visas. The Department for Work and Pensions does not cancel the numbers when they expire; it just keeps them, so there must be millions more than the entire population. To give the House an example of that, there are approximately 72 million live NHS numbers in England and Wales, while the population of those two countries is 56 million. Presumably, some 16 million non-residents are on the books of the NHS. Can we really afford this?

I believe that the survival of European civilisation, which historically has been based on democracy, Christianity and the nation state, is today under challenge from the jihadists of Islamic State. We must act to defend it, and I hope that the Government take this debate as a starting point for urgent action.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for obtaining this debate and for the excellent way he introduced it. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, will not mind if I do not follow him directly down that route, but I can inform him that I believe his suggestion is very close to what the Government intend to propose at some point in the near future.

I will take this debate one stage if not several stages further. We are living through a technological and scientific revolution that has changed the world more in the last 50 years, and will increasingly do so in the next five or 10 years, than has ever happened before in the history of mankind. That is the world we live in. I want to move from the idea of an ID card to what I would call a smart card for all. Such a card would of course do all the things my noble friend said as regards introducing security, giving people the right to know what is on it, and so on. However, I want that to be a smart card which enables people to put on to it all the information we hold.

Every one of us in this Chamber and probably in the Houses of Parliament as a whole has a form of identification. I hang it around my neck, because I do not assume that the policemen at the gate automatically know who I am. At the end of the day, that is an ID card. It opens doors—I have only to put that on to a door and I can open it. I have a driving licence in my wallet, a passport at home, bank cards and a whole series of membership cards for different organisations. Why should I not just have one card, with some form of identification on it—a fingerprint or an eye scan, or whatever it might be, or even DNA, as my noble friend suggested? That would mean that I could get rid of all the various forms of ID I have at present because I would have one card. I accept that people might say, “But you might lose it, so maybe we should have three or four cards”. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, says, people will not find it easy to reproduce it, so even if you lose it, it will become just a piece of detritus that you can leave. Eventually, however, there will be a chip in the back of your hand, all the information will go on to that, and you will put that on to things.

Turning to the commercial aspect, the Government are talking to the banks about the idea of them paying for some of this. Banks and those who deal online, such as travel agents, or people who sell online on Amazon, will increasingly want some form of ID—a way in which they can establish the identity of the person who buys their goods or who goes to the bank machine, and know that that person is who they claim to be. Therefore, the banks may in the first instance put an extra slot in the bank machine so you can put in your ID card and then your bank card. It would be even better if the bank could put its banking services on to that single card, so you put one card in the machine, put your fingerprint on it or let it scan your eye, and then the bank could say you are the right person.

That is the world we live in. The technology is already there. I am sorry to have to say this to my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey, but the fact is that the Apple iPhone 6 is available with a fingerprint control, and you can bank with it and buy almost any goods with it. So we already have the technology. You have to use some form of card—although, I accept, not an ID card—on London Transport buses because they will not allow you to use cash any more. Cash will be a thing of the past—in the next 10 or 15 years it will have gone. Cheques are already going and cash will go next.

That is the world in which we live. If this place does not keep pace with that technology, we will be in very grave danger of not keeping up with what is going on in the world outside, and if that happens, we will start to lose democracy itself.

[Lord Marlesford]

Perhaps I may tell the noble Lord that in York, none of the machines taking cards would work because of the awful floods, and people could not buy food from the supermarkets. They needed cash.

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[Lord Bates]

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, we have introduced 100% border checks at scheduled arrival ports in the United Kingdom. I cannot see how that assertion would stack up with the evidence.

[Lord Marlesford]

What matters is the proportion of people who are checked when they arrive and leave. What is the figure in each case now—not what is planned, not what is hoped for, but now?

[Lord Bates]

I gave the answer in another context. We have introduced 100% checks for scheduled arrivals at main UK ports, and in April we introduced exit checks for scheduled departures from UK ports.

[Lord Marlesford]

Is my noble friend saying that 100% refers to exit checks as well?

[Lord Bates]

I am saying that the exit checks apply at scheduled departure ports. That is quite a precise statement. That covers the vast majority of people who come in and out of this country.

[Lord Marlesford]

I am sorry, I must ask my noble friend: are 100% of the people leaving the UK checked or not?

[Lord Bates]

The short answer is no by my noble friend’s definition, but at the principal ports of entry and departure 100% are checked.

Let me cover some of the additional points that have been raised. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, raised some very interesting points about prisoner numbers. I will share them with the Ministry of Justice and look at whether there could be greater use of existing identity numbers for people in prisons to allow better and easier access to different sorts of information.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made the point that better identity information might lead to greater tax revenues. The UK has one of the smallest tax gaps in the world, which is a reflection not only of the effectiveness of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs but of the tax rates that are levied on people.

On the argument that we ought to have more information in fewer places, to the point where we receive all information in one place, as the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, postulated might happen in future, multiple sources of data help reduce some security risks. If all DWP, health, passport, criminal record, DVLA, HMRC, DBS and DNA data were in one place, it would make their cybersecurity extremely vulnerable. My noble friend Lady Shields is Minister for Internet Safety and Security, and I will make sure that the contents of this debate and noble Lords’ contributions to it are drawn to her attention.

It is right to talk about the balance between liberty and security, as the noble Lords, Lord Scriven and Lord Oates, said, but it is also correct that without security there can be no liberty. However, their points were made, and I have noted them. An important guarantee of those liberties is the rigorous, independent system for checking where access may have occurred. For example, we have a Biometrics Commissioner, an Information Commissioner and even a Surveillance Camera Commissioner. They are all important guarantees to citizens that their information is handled carefully.

The noble Viscount, Lord Simon, mentioned the Disclosure and Barring Service. I shall write to the noble Viscount about that. There is a service standard on the Disclosure and Barring Service which would be substantially less than the three-month to four-month term that he mentioned. We will therefore need to find out why, in those particular circumstances, that was not being met.

The noble Lord, Lord Blair, challenged me—this is a very important point—to say from a Conservative perspective why Conservatives are so opposed to this. As a number of noble Lords have mentioned, this is not an ideological position; it was a Conservative Government who first introduced and discussed the idea of having an identity card, so it is not something to which we as a party are ideologically opposed. However, we have hardly been guilty of changing our mind on this at frequent intervals; we set out our position very clearly, from 2005 onwards, that we were opposed to ID cards. I recall taking part in debates from the other side of the House during the passage of that legislation and around that time, so we have been very clear for 10 years that we do not believe that to be the way forward.

The noble Lord, Lord Blair, is a distinguished former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. As we were preparing for this debate, I asked what representations we had received from the police and security services saying they believed that an ID card as proposed would be essential for them in tackling fraud or crime.

Police: Officer Offences

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

We draw the conclusion that that needs to be improved. We recognise that. That is one reason why the College of Policing has introduced a new code about how vetting is undertaken. At the moment, it is done on a constabulary by constabulary basis and there are differences. We want best practice across all constabularies. A new authorised, professional standard of vetting is being issued and is expected to be introduced across all the constabularies in the country.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that conviction in open court for a criminal offence is a matter of public record? Will he therefore take steps to obtain the information which the noble Baroness asked for and publish it in Hansard, with the names of those concerned, the dates of conviction, the offences for which they were convicted and the sentences that they were given, as soon as possible?

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is right to say that it is a matter of public record. What we are trying to do here in the wider sense is to have a central role for the College of Policing, which we have established, to raise standards across a whole raft of areas. It has now introduced a “struck off” list. Some 444 police officers have been struck off, and that is a matter of public record. We have also said that disciplinary hearings need in future to be held in public and to be chaired by an independent, legally qualified individual. These are all steps in the same direction that I think the noble Lord wants to go.

Aviation Security

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

As regards my noble friend’s final point, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on media speculation. Generally speaking, intelligence agencies, and the sharing of intelligence with our allies to avert any such tragedy, is an important part of how international co-operation works. I agree absolutely with her earlier point about a wake-up call. This is very close to home for me as I am the Minister responsible for aviation security at the Department for Transport. I assure noble Lords that we have regular reviews in place. I look regularly at the issues and challenges we face on this front. In doing so, officials and Ministers engage with, but also visit, different locations to review security arrangements. The challenge we face—it is out there, we have all said it before and I am sure we all relate to it—is that a determined terrorist will go to any length to achieve their aim and their aim, ultimately, is to cause disruption and destruction to innocent lives. We must come together to universally condemn it and I pay tribute to all noble Lords who have spoken today. Notwithstanding the questions that they have rightly asked, we have come together rightly to condemn this tragedy, in which the current quite strong suggestion is that a bomb was involved.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I have no difficulty in accepting the Government’s view that a bomb is a significant possibility. I am sure my noble friend will agree that, if it was a bomb, there is no possibility other than that it was a terrorist incident. As the noble Baroness from the other side said, I think we can all agree that the minimum way of dealing with terrorists is to lock them up. In that context, taking into account the history of terrorism in recent years in Egypt, it is obviously very important to know who is responsible. ISIS has already claimed, apparently, to have downed the aircraft. When do the Government expect to publish the report of the Jenkins inquiry into the terrorist links of the Muslim Brotherhood?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I thank my noble friend for his support of the Government’s position. The review to which he referred is being looked at by the Government and we will, I am sure, look to publish it at the earliest opportunity. He asked about the links we have; indeed, he suggested, and it has been widely reported, that Daesh/ISIL has claimed responsibility. As I was coming into the Chamber I noticed, again through media outlets, that a video to that effect has been released. The threat we face from ISIL/Daesh is real and is leveraging itself not just in that region but beyond.

The other thing I will say about ISIL/Daesh is that its recruitment methods are such that it seeks to recruit not just from different countries within the region but, regrettably, from right here in the United Kingdom. We are taking steps to avert and prevent our citizens travelling to support such a perverse ideology and cause. Wherever we see acts of terror we will collaborate with all right-minded Governments to ensure that we can eradicate it.

Calais: Border Management

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

There is an issue in relation to Italy. We would like to see the Italian authorities recognise that they have a major crisis on their hands and take care to ensure that, when people arrive in Italy, they are fingerprinted, registered and recorded as the Dublin regulations require. Her Majesty’s Government’s position is that, if that were to happen in Italy, it would reduce the flows heading north beyond that area.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, will my noble friend confirm that, if non-EU citizens enter the UK from France, they are not entitled to claim asylum in Britain, because the rules require non-EU citizens who arrive in the EU to claim asylum in the first country that they arrive in?

EU: Asylum Seekers

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for securing this debate.

The key phrase he used was “small number”. That is simply not true: we are not talking about small numbers; we are talking about 3 million or 4 million refugees from the present conflict in the Middle East, and potentially millions more—probably half a million—waiting on the Libyan coast to be removed. The situation is wholly unsustainable as it is. It is not surprising that the members of the EU have rejected the EU quota proposals, because they are pure tokenism, pure gesture politics. If we talk about tens of thousands, or 100,000 or 200,000 in total, we are not beginning to scratch the surface. Let us look a little wider and a little more realistically at what has really happened.

The problem is that we have set up a system—absolutely rightly, as we have a moral and international obligation—to rescue people in peril at sea. People are put into small dinghies with outboard motors and enough petrol to get out to sea, and then, following a mobile phone call, HMS “Bulwark” or somebody rescues them. It would be more logical to send HMS “Bulwark” to Tripoli to transfer them. That is not the solution. The Prime Minister has made it clear that we have to break the link between getting on a boat and getting residence in Europe.

I strongly propose that we set up a new holding area somewhere in north Africa. Various countries have been mentioned, including Tunisia and Egypt. I favour Libya, which is already a failing state. We should not just set up a holding area but think a bit more widely and set up something that could one day itself become a state. I would call it Refugia, for want of a better name. It is not an EU problem; it is a UN problem, a world problem. We would need a UN mandate in the form of a Security Council resolution. The Security Council is the fastest legislature in the world; its resolutions have the force of international law. It would have to be negotiated with the appropriate country in north Africa. We would set it up and then it would need military help for its establishment, protection and guarding. That would probably best be done by NATO, again under UN auspices.

There have been many examples in history of democratic states emerging from temporary arrangements where other countries have a mandate to run some territory. This happened after the First World War with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of Syria, Iraq, Palestine and the rest. After the Second World War, Germany and Japan were run by other countries and eventually emerged as fully democratic states.

I suggest, therefore, that we have a holding area which people could be returned to or take refuge in and be properly assessed. Some may well be admitted to countries as economic migrants, refugees or asylum seekers. The main challenge, however, is to do it on a scale that meets the problem, which is enormous. The problem is caused largely by the growth of political Islam, a basically fascist organisation that is having a profoundly destabilising effect on the world. We must have a solution that is relative and relevant to the size of the problem.

Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (Authority to Carry Scheme) Regulations 2015

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, these instruments form a very important part of the defence of our borders and of the realm. I think I am right in saying that they provide for the reintroduction of the monitoring of the departure of persons from the United Kingdom. I want to ask my noble friend—in as far as the instruments cover the departure of persons from the United Kingdom—about the method of administering the scrutiny of travel documents of persons proposing to or attempting to depart. Is that scrutiny made by the organisation, company or airline by which the persons intends to travel, or by an immigration officer in the same way as is now being done to people arriving? In other words, who will scrutinise passports? Under these instruments, will it be done by the airline or whatever? If it is not being done by an immigration official scrutinising the travel documents using the latest technology, will any warning that an immigration officer would have who scrutinises and examines a passport or other travel document of somebody seeking to arrive in this country—a system that has advanced a great deal in recent years—be available to anyone who is asked to scrutinise the document or passport of someone seeking to depart from the United Kingdom in the same way? In other words, will a non-government official to whom the task is delegated, such as the airline, the railway people or the boat people, have that same information or be able to have it under these instruments?

[Baroness Humphreys (LD)]

My Lords, I merely seek clarification on one aspect of the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act’s code of practice for officers exercising functions under Schedule 1 of the Act, which accompanies these instruments. This code of practice is referred to in the 28th report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. The final sentence of the information paragraph reads:

“In its consideration of the Code the Committee was concerned that directions about when officers may search a member of the opposite sex, particularly a child, were not as clear and consistent as they need to be”.

I am most grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his reply to my written query regarding this matter, but I remain concerned that the clarification I sought has not quite been met.

The committee and I still have concerns relating to the powers that the code of practice confers on officers who need to search a child—defined as anybody under 18—in order to seize or retain their travel documents. The code is exemplary in its guidance to police constables and designated border control officers, highlighting the care which must be taken when exercising their powers and the need to be aware of the necessity of safeguarding a child’s safety and welfare, as well as urging officers to be sensitive to the intimidation that children travelling alone can feel and the possibility that they may be vulnerable to exploitation by an adult with whom they are travelling.

I draw the attention of the House to paragraph 31, which outlines the scope of the power as it relates to the searching of children who have been removed from an adult. In particular, it gives guidance that two officers of the same sex as the child should, where reasonably practicable, be present during the search. It was the insertion of the three words, “where reasonably practicable”, which most concerned the committee and which led to its call for clarity. It seemed to the committee that the words,

“two officers of the same sex … where reasonably practicable”,

could give rise to any number of permissible permutations. I would be grateful if the Minister would clarify which of these would be justifiable and acceptable.

If two officers of the same sex as the child are not available, would two officers, one of the same sex and one of the opposite sex, be acceptable? If they are not available, would two officers of the opposite sex to the child be acceptable? If two officers are not available, would just one officer of the same sex as the child be acceptable? If they are not available, would just one officer of the opposite sex to the child be acceptable? At this stage, I am at a loss to understand why the last alternative is included. Are we to take from this that our ports are so understaffed that there are likely to be times when only one officer of the opposite sex will be available to search a child?

The code has already referred to the intimidation that a child travelling alone can experience. Does the Minister believe that a child, removed from an adult, would experience a similar feeling if searched by one or two officers of the opposite sex because they were the only reasonably practicable alternatives?

I would also be grateful if the Minister would add some detail on the advice given to officers governing the circumstances in which a child may be searched in the absence of the responsible adult with whom they are travelling, and explain how the child is to be removed from the adult and where the search will take place. If the child is travelling with an adult who is deemed to be exerting influence or pressure, how is an officer to defend him or herself against accusations of inappropriate behaviour if the child is influenced to make accusations against the officer and there are no witnesses to the search?

However, these children are unlikely to make a complaint about the manner in which they are searched, by whom they are searched and where they are searched. They are intent on leaving this country and, to all intents and purposes, this renders them powerless to control their situation. I would want firm guidelines to govern the way in which my grandchildren could be removed from my presence and searched at a UK port. Those firm, unambiguous guidelines should be applicable to all children.

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee called for clarity in this aspect of the code of practice. I hope that the Minister will be able to provide the House with that clarity and describe, definitively, the circumstances under which children will be searched.