Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Marlesford and Lord Teverson

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.