Romanian and Bulgarian Accession

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

As I noted, a number of hon. Members have raised this issue, so I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on being the third to do so. I have just responded to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) on that very matter. On the point about the European Commission, I agree that it has so far failed to respond. It has, however, moved in that it has accepted that the concept of free movement can be abused and that some abuse of it does take place. This is why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and I are working to build within the EU, a coalition of member states—beyond those I have already mentioned—that remain concerned about this issue, wish to see something done about it and can bring greater pressure on the Commission.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is clearly right to clamp down on abuse, but will the Home Secretary confirm that the vast majority of EU migrants here do not claim benefits and instead contribute substantially to our country and our economy—to the tune of £25 billion, according to one study from University college London?

[Mrs May]

The problem is that the last Labour Government made no attempt to collect any information, so nobody knows the number of people claiming benefits when coming into this country in 2004. This Government are now starting to collect that information so that we can build up a better picture at the same time as we are tightening up access to those benefits. We are not able to say what the picture was previously because the last Government failed to collect the figures.

Psychoactive Substances

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Diana Johnson]

If the right hon. Gentleman had been listening, he would know I was making the case for why I am questioning whether the procedure in this proposal would actually work. I want the Minister to respond to the Government’s advice on the point about the effect that such a proposal would have on any determination this country could make about its own classification.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The hon. Lady rightly raises the question of our making our own determinations, which I hope she will agree should be evidence based. Has she seen the advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that khat should not be controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and will the official Opposition follow that evidence-based line when it comes to a vote in the Statutory Instrument Committee?

[Diana Johnson]

The hon. Gentleman should perhaps look to his own coalition Government, who decided not to follow the advice of the ACMD. As a Member of one of the two ruling coalition parties, perhaps he should question his own Ministers on that point.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Diana Johnson]

I am going to move on because I do not want to get sidetracked into a debate on khat as that is not the purpose of this debate. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could ask his Ministers about their position as they are part of the Government who are not using—[Interruption.] Well, I have made my position clear. He should look to his own Ministers. The Liberal Democrats cannot have it all ways—I know they try, but perhaps on this they should look to their Liberal Democrat Minister in the Home Office.

It would be helpful if the Minister set out clearly his position on classification. EU co-operation on drugs is not new, but previously the agreement was that drugs, as recognised by the UN agreement on narcotics, needed to be controlled and the trafficking of drugs tackled. The proposals we are discussing go far further than that. Drugs that would be deemed low risk will not be restricted; those deemed a moderate risk will be prohibited from the consumer market; and the most dangerous drugs will be prohibited altogether, with a possible exception for medical use. I should make it clear that the Opposition do not want to cede powers on drug classification to the EU, and I press the Minister on the Government’s legal advice on how the adoption of the directive could affect the UK Government’s position. The Home Office explanatory memorandum states:

“we do not consider that the measure complies with the principle of proportionality. In particular, the effect of Article 4 of the draft Regulation fetters the UK from adopting more stringent measures to control NPS. In our view, it is vital for the UK, guided as necessary by EU expertise in NPS but not bound by it, to have the final say when deciding whether to exceed any minimum standards mandated by the EU.”

Although the Opposition concur generally with that, it would be helpful if the Minister explained exactly what the Government mean by “fetters”. Do the Government believe that article 4 would prevent them from placing strong prohibitions on a substance?

When we turn to articles 3 and 4, we see that the Commission has placed a strong emphasis on free trade, as I have said. Article 3, on free movement, states:

“New psychoactive substances and mixtures shall move freely in the Union for commercial and industrial use”.

Article 4, on the prevention of barriers to free movement, states that, in so far as

“the Union has not adopted measures to subject a new psychoactive substance to market restriction under this Regulation, Member States may adopt…regulations”.

Is it the Government’s view that member states could impose restrictions only before the EU has classified a drug? Would the Commission classifying a drug as low risk, and therefore not restricting sale in any way, count as having adopted a measure, therefore precluding further action from member states? For its part, the Commission thinks not—it argues that in its impact assessment.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Mann]

It is a late hour and I have had no substances of any height during the day, but I have been building up my adrenalin, looking forward to this debate.

I have been monitoring what the Home Office has been doing in this field. Whenever I speak to people from other countries, they keep telling me how the British Government—this coalition Government—are out there seeking their views and trying to learn from them. Portugal is one of the leaders of the move towards drug legalisation across the world, but the Czech Republic is following—that makes two EU states—and the European monitoring body on drugs is based in Lisbon.

[Dr Huppert]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Mann]

I would like to make my point first, so that the hon. Gentleman can understand it in its fullness.

It is this Government who have been going and listening to the legalisers. I suspect that the European Commission is making an attempt over time to pull together these strands, backed by several senior police officers in this country, so that they can evaporate the problem of drugs and say that crime will reduce, because if we legalise lots of things and do not criminalise others, we will not need to spend as much money on policing, because crime will be falling all the time. What is happening with this Government—it is why the Minister has encouraged this proposal from the EU and now wishes to demolish it—is an attempt to block legal highs being made into illegal highs so that crime does not go up, because they are not providing the police in areas like mine that are disproportionately impacted by the current legal highs.

I carried out my own public inquiry in Worksop town hall this January into the question of legal highs, asking the young people, the police, the health service and others what was going on. It was interesting to find out that it was not only young people who were taking these substances. It was also middle-aged people, although not perhaps elderly people. It was the people who participate in what the Government call the night-time economy and what I would call pubs with late licences. People are tanking up at home on cheap alcohol then going out to the pubs and nightclubs and taking these substances. The owners of the pubs and clubs complained to my inquiry that their biggest problem was that people were taking cheap pills and other highs instead of buying alcohol.

By the way, allowing pubs to have late licences was the worst error of the last Labour Government. My biggest error in this place was not to speak out and try to alter that policy as it was going through because applying a city solution to areas like mine was totally inappropriate. One pub in my area is open till 5 in the morning, but nobody is drinking beer or spirits; they are allegedly—according to all the information I have—taking all sorts of substances that the Government will not deem illegal because they do not want the police to arrest people, though the police are not there anyway, because the Government have cut their numbers; and there are not even any police cells left in my area to put people in, and the police community support officers are about to take over neighbourhood policing. But nobody is being arrested for using legal highs in the pubs, and of course they are not because the highs are legal. This is part of Home Office policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Mann]

I dare not digress.

Like the Government, the European Union is doing nothing other than create an excuse for allowing the growth of legal highs without criminal sanctions. Some European Union countries think exactly the same way as this Government think. They are saying, “The more we create illegal drugs, the more criminality there will be; the less we spend on police, the more that criminality will grow, and the public will not like that.” That is the problem that the Minister should be addressing. I put it to him that he should go back to look at the origins of this proposal and withdraw the Government’s policy of going around these legalising countries to see what we can learn from them. Instead, he should be looking at the problems in areas like mine.

[Dr Huppert]

I tried to intervene earlier on this point. The hon. Gentleman keeps talking about countries like Portugal as though they are legalising drugs. Does he not realise that Portugal has not legalised drugs and has no plans to legalise them? What it has done is to decriminalise them—a huge difference, which the hon. Gentleman should try to understand.

[John Mann]

I am familiar with the system in Portugal, having met the Portuguese and seen the myths created by their policy. Yes, the nuances of language are important for the law, but I am talking about the objective of allowing police cuts in areas like mine, which are the areas with the biggest problem with legal highs. This is part of a deliberate Government strategy. I put it to the Minister that as well as taking this back to the European Union, he should tell it that it has no remit in this area, no expertise to give and no valid data. He should stop relying on EU statistics and the EU agenda in setting Government policy. He should listen to the good people of Bassetlaw who say, “We don’t want legal highs in our clubs, pubs and streets; we want systems to make them illegal, and then we want the police in place to prosecute on the basis of them.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

I shall try to be relatively brief and to resist the temptation to discuss the speech of the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann). I think that it was the first speech that I have heard in which someone has objected to the concept of talking to other people to identify good practice, which is surely something that most of us would want to do.

It is clear that a huge problem is posed by new psychoactive substances. As that has been reiterated so many times, I shall not go into it in detail now, but I will say that the rise in the number of such substances is partly our fault, because our prohibition-led policy has made it possible to be sentenced to years in jail for possessing one tablet of known harm, but to receive no penalty for possessing something else of unknown harm, which could be far more serious.

We know that some of the new substances are more harmful than substances that we have already controlled. Our use of the term “legal highs” suggests to the public that it is all right to take such substances, because it implies that they are safer than others. If ecstasy is a class A drug and another substance is legal, that suggests that we have made an assessment of the risk, which is deeply misleading. It flies in the face of any evidence-based policy, but it also flies in the face of what we all want to do, which is to reduce the harms from drug use. All substances of this kind, whether legal or illegal, have harms, and we must try to reduce those harms.

I agree with the Minister that the European proposal is not the right one to adopt, but what is the correct way in which to deal with all these substances? On the general subject, I follow the Portuguese line. I think that decriminalisation has worked very well there. Only those on the far right in politics opposed it originally, and now it is supported by people throughout the political spectrum and by the police themselves. The Home Affairs Committee conducted a detailed study of all the issues, and that was our very clear finding.

What is the solution? What is not the solution is simply to ban everything that is psychoactive. I suspect that that is what the hon. Member for Bassetlaw is proposing, and it is certainly what the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) proposed in a new clause to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, which would have included making the sale of caffeine, including coffee, illegal. I do not think that that was the intention of the new clause, but it illustrates the problems that arise when we try to ban things. Coffee is a psychoactive substance. I will not ask how many Members who are present have consumed some of that psychoactive substance today, but quite a number will have done so. That illustrates the danger of being extremist and banning everything.

What we should do is adopt an alternative to the European proposal, and emulate, for example, what has been done in New Zealand. When the New Zealand Government asked the New Zealand Law Commission to look at their drug laws—the Select Committee report goes into this in much more detail—the commission proposed the establishment of an independent regulatory authority to test substances, so that manufacturers and importers would have to demonstrate their safety. I am pleased to see that other members of the Select Committee are present. We proposed that urgent action should be taken, based on existing trading standards and consumer protection legislation, to deal with the sale of untested substances. The onus should be on the person selling a substance to check that it is safe. That is the right way to tackle the huge number of new psychoactive substances.

[Diana Johnson]

Perhaps I could correct the record. The new clause to which the hon. Gentleman referred would have dealt with exactly the problem that he has raised by building on the work that had already been done in relation to young people who were sniffing glue. I believe that it was a Conservative Government who had previously legislated to put the onus on shopkeepers who sold substances that could be used for that purpose, and the new clause was intended to put the onus on the seller in the same way. I take exception to the way in which he has described its aims.

[Dr Huppert]

New clause 2 stated:

“It is an offence for a person to supply, or offer to supply, a psychoactive substance, including but not restricted to…a powder…a pill…a liquid; or…a herbal substance with the appearance of cannabis which he knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, to be so acting, that the substance is likely to be consumed by a person for the purpose of causing intoxication.”

That would make it illegal to sell coffee. It is perfectly possible to be intoxicated by caffeine, which is an addictive substance. The hon. Lady is right to say that the new clause deals only with the supply of substances, but, although some of us may have concerns about Starbucks paying taxes or otherwise, I think that making the company illegal would be going too far.

Roughly one in five of the notified new psychoactive substances are used for legitimate purposes in industry or research, or as active substances in medicines. We must be extremely careful about how we proceed, because a global ban would give rise to all sorts of problems.

We have touched on the Home Secretary’s decision to ban khat. She has tabled a statutory instrument to do so. That was her decision; it was not a jointly signed off one, and I was very disappointed by it.

I was also very disappointed and surprised that the shadow Minister had no idea what her own policy was. [Interruption.] If she would like to say what it is, I will be happy to take an intervention. Apparently, she does not wish to do so.

The Government have twice asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs what to do about khat. This is a classic example of a legal high that exists and would be covered by this provision, and where we have to work out what to do. The ACMD said that

“the evidence of harms associated with the use of khat is insufficient to justify control and it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to classify khat under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.”

It also said that

“the evidence shows that khat has no direct causal links to adverse medical effects”.

It went on to say there is no robust evidence of a causal link between khat consumption and any of the social harms indicated, and no evidence of it being connected with organised criminal behaviour.

[Mr Bone]

Will the hon. Gentleman tell me what his definition of “brief” is?

[Dr Huppert]

I suspect I will be one of the briefest speakers in this debate, not counting interventions. That will have to do as a working definition, and I have almost concluded.

Not only is it clear from the evidence that banning khat will be harmful and will not solve the problem, but it would also cost this country £12.8 million a year in the loss of the VAT that is currently being paid on the legal import of khat, with a total cost of £150 million, according to the Government’s own estimates. This is an example of a legal high that the Home Secretary is proposing to ban, and I intend to vote against that when we have the opportunity to do so, and it would be fantastic if the Labour party decided to join us. That example shows why this is such a hard issue.

I agree with the Minister that we should make it clear to the EU that we should make our own decisions, but it is also important that those decisions are the right ones.

Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

On the last points, Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed is indeed a British citizen. I do not have his passport, but the police do. I know the right hon. Gentleman raised the same issue over the Magag case. On tags, as I said earlier, the police believe that, in this case, the tag functioned exactly as it should have done. He referred to the court case. The issue there was not about the effectiveness of the tags, but about reaching the evidence threshold for taking a criminal prosecution in relation to the operation of the tag.[Official Report, 6 November 2013, Vol. 570, c. 1MC.]

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

I agree completely with the Home Secretary that people who have committed terrorism offences should be convicted and in jail. Does she agree, however, that to have forcible relocation for people not convicted of any offence is not only a bad idea, but deeply un-British?

[Mrs May]

As my hon. Friend knows, the TPIM legislation did not contain relocation provisions. As I indicated in a couple of earlier responses, gradually, over time, the courts were reducing the ability to use various measures within the control orders, and they made it clear that they were not orders on which people should be left indefinitely.

Intelligence and Security Services

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan. I thank the hon. Members for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) and for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) for supporting me in securing this debate. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for finding the time for it so quickly after we submitted our bid. I hope that that shows how timely the debate is; the Committee realised that we needed to hold it at the earliest possible juncture. Although the discussion is live in America and much of Europe, Members of Parliament have been fairly mute so far and have not had the chance to discuss it thoroughly.

As technology changes and the capacity of the state and companies to collect and analyse data grows massively, we are in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society on a scale that peacetime Britain has never seen. It is not planned, and nor is it the actions of malevolent individuals; it is merely the natural trend of what will happen if nothing is done to stop it.

It can be argued that the definitions of war and peace are no longer the same, and that our enemies are faceless and splintered and will attack our way of life if we give them an inch—that argument is often made by Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries—but if we shape our laws solely in response to that fear, chipping away at our own liberty and privacy, those enemies have already won.

The key questions of security, privacy and liberty in a digital age will come to define the 21st century. The world is changing. All of us carry around tracking devices, in the shape of our mobile phones, wherever we go. We carry devices that can be activated and controlled remotely and that store much of our most personal information. Who can read it? Who has access to that information? How do we want to protect it? We have to agree the rules now, before we lose control completely.

Sir David Omand, former head of GCHQ, said:

“Democratic legitimacy demands that, where new methods of intelligence gathering and use are to be introduced, they should be on a firm legal basis and rest on parliamentary and public understanding of what is involved”.

In no sense do I oppose the people who work in our intelligence and security services; the work that they do is fundamental to our fight against crime and terrorism, not only in the UK but beyond our borders. Their work force make up the front line, and for the most part, they do exactly what we would expect of them, for we have given them the tools through legislation to monitor and take action against those who threaten the fabric of our society. As the Prime Minister said, they deserve to be recognised for keeping us safe while working in the shadows.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the very people about whom he is talking have been put under grave threat by some of the reporting, particularly by The Guardian newspaper, of the leaks?

[Dr Huppert]

No, I do not. I understand that the secretary who looks at the defence advisory notices has confirmed that nothing has been published in The Guardian that suggests a risk to life. The Guardian has not published photos on its website of anybody who works in the area without pixellating their faces.

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

How does the hon. Gentleman know that? He does not have complete oversight of either The Guardian’s material or the intelligence material with which it fits in. He is just assuming that what he has read in The Guardian is fine, safe and vetted by Guardian journalists. That is simply not enough to satisfy people of their personal safety.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. His argument, unfortunately, falls foul of the fact that one could say that about absolutely anything: one can never know whether some innocent revelation has been made. However, it is clear that The Guardian has been in contact with the security services and has spoken to the DA notices committee since 17 June. That is the assurance that it has had.

I think that The Guardian has been deeply responsible. It would have been irresponsible if it had refused to have any role in the matter and allowed the information to be passed out by other people who might not have the same regard for our security and staff.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Dr Huppert]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), but then I would like to make further progress.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I congratulate him on securing this debate. Does he agree that the focus on and obsession with The Guardian is extraordinary compared with what is happening in the US, where they are talking about the really important issues, such as mass surveillance and its implications for citizens’ privacy? Should we not get on with talking about that and worry rather less about what seems to have been a responsible use of data?

[Dr Huppert]

I agree. It is interesting that a clear effort is being made to focus on The Guardian rather than the wider issues, which affect more of us.

We must ensure that the laws and guidance available to the staff of our intelligence and security services are clear, and that we ourselves understand the framework in which we expect them to operate. President Obama put it well when he said that what they are able to do is not necessarily what they should do. He called for additional constraints on how we gather and use intelligence, and said we need to weigh the risks and rewards of activities more effectively. Our Prime Minister agreed in a European statement:

“A lack of trust could prejudice the necessary cooperation in the field of intelligence gathering”.

This is a global issue acknowledged by world leaders. We should be talking about it here.

[Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on obtaining this important debate. Next week, the director general of MI5, the chief of MI6 and the director of GCHQ will all give evidence in person before a parliamentary Committee, which is welcome. In light of the reviews being carried out in America following the revelations there, does my hon. Friend agree that if the responses given by those three individuals are not entirely satisfactory, there might be a case for considering a review of accountability in the United Kingdom?

[Dr Huppert]

There is definitely a strong case for it. I am pleased that those people will appear in public, as there has been a long tradition of reluctance about talking about such issues. A senior Home Office civil servant has even refused to give public evidence at the Home Affairs Committee; that, fortunately, is about to change.

When the Foreign Secretary spoke at the London conference on cyberspace in 2011, he championed freedom of expression and privacy online, and he specifically criticised Governments who incorporate surveillance tools into their internet infrastructure. I agree that that is a problem. He also said at that conference that

“it is increasingly clear that countries with weak cyber defences and capabilities will find themselves exposed over the long term”.

The Foreign Secretary is right. That is why it is a problem when people break encryption systems. If anyone—whether it is the US, the UK or anybody else—puts a back door in an otherwise secure system in order to access it for intelligence purposes, that makes it easier for anybody else to break the protections, whether they are from the intelligence community or cyber-criminals. It makes no sense to argue that we should defend cyber-security and simultaneously be part of the effort to break it. If that means that we can no longer rely on the encryption of financial transactions, for example, that would be catastrophic for the global economy.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

Can my hon. Friend name a single intelligence agency anywhere in the world that he thinks is not trying to break encryption systems?

[Dr Huppert]

My hon. Friend makes a helpful point. Of course, I do not have a list of every single intelligence service. The difference is between trying to break encryption after things have been encrypted and trying to break the entire system, leaving a back door open, which fundamentally means that anybody can access it. That is different from brute-force methods or other techniques used.

My hon. Friend makes the good point that this is an international issue. How would we feel if it were not GCHQ or the American National Security Agency but the Chinese who were involved? How would we react if the Chinese admitted that they had been tapping the Prime Minister’s phone? Would we be annoyed and concerned, or would we say, “That’s fine; that’s business as usual”? Clearly, we do not take the situation seriously enough.

For example, we allow the Chinese company Huawei to supply a lot of the equipment that makes up the core of our infrastructure. I suspect that our intelligence agents would not miss the chance to install some equipment if we were given the chance to put in the backbone of the Chinese internet, so we should not assume that the Chinese would miss such an opportunity. That was criticised by the Intelligence and Security Committee, which highlighted the disconnect between the UK’s inward investment policy and its national security. If we can understand it sometimes, we should understand it more broadly.

A change is occurring. Individual surveillance is one thing, but the mass hoovering up of information enabled by new technologies has changed the system completely. It means that suspicion no longer comes first. I think that very few people think it inappropriate to target individuals where there is a serious suspicion of wrongdoing, but in the new approach, we are all suspects whose personal histories can be foraged through if ever there is interest in us later.

The Foreign Secretary spoke at the conference of his passionate conviction that all human rights should carry full force online—not just the right to privacy, but the right to freedom of expression. I agree. How we choose to respond to the challenge will define the age that we live in. As parliamentarians and as Parliament, we must be at the heart of this debate.

In America, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has spoken out about the revelations that America has been spying on Angela Merkel in Germany and on 34 other world leaders. She said:

“Congress needs to know exactly what our intelligence community is doing.”

She then said:

“It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary.”

She criticised the fact that her committee was not satisfactorily informed. I have not yet heard the Chair of our Intelligence and Security Committee being so outspoken. Perhaps we will hear from him later in the debate, but would he know whether he was not being told things in the way that Dianne Feinstein was not?

There are differences in the debate between the UK and the USA. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights sets out a contract between the state and its citizens with a bias towards favouring individual liberty and privacy. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the debate is happening so loudly in the US but not here.

In Germany, too, there is a loud debate. It is deeply concerned about what has happened. It has the history of the Stasi, which operated within the law as it then stood, but well beyond the bounds of morality and ethics. I am sure that no member of our current intelligence agencies would dream of following the Stasi’s lead; I do not suggest that for a moment. Germany is aware of what can happen when such systems go wrong.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman makes some interesting comparisons between what we do in this country and what is done in Germany, the United States and so forth. Obviously, we can scrutinise only what happens here. Does he agree that it is difficult to find a country where the clandestine community performs so well, but under such scrutiny within the confines of the democratic process?

Part of this debate must be about the use of technology and the internet. I express a concern that, as we rightly debate this matter, we should be careful that we do not place limitations on operations that will expose us to more danger, because of those people who choose to do us harm.

[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.

[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. It is essential that parliamentarians from every part of the House debate such issues, including, where possible, classified information. He has talked about balance, which is absolutely central to this debate. It is the balance between security, liberty and privacy and the need to keep our secrets safe and to enable our agencies to do their job. He is a scientist and believes in making decisions on the basis of evidence. There is a real danger here that we have this big debate about privacy almost in a vacuum. Does he accept that virtually every operation that has foiled a terrorist plot in this country has been dependent on communications data over the past decade or so, and that it is essential for our agencies to have those powers, but obviously within a robust legal framework?

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention. No one is saying that we should make illegal the collection of communications data; that would be a problem. She is also right to say that we need evidence; we cannot have a vacuum. That is exactly why it is helpful to know some of what is being said. We have heard people who say that we should never publish anything that would inform this debate. I want an informed debate, and I am pleased that we can have one.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman refers to the Stasi and to the different cultural approach that we have here in the UK towards many of these issues. A view that is shared by people with a similar mindset—perhaps it is one that he thinks is not true—is that somehow the intelligence agencies are able to intercept at will. Will he go into some detail about precisely the protection—the amount of warranty and the legal framework—that is absolutely necessary before any internet account or telephone can be tapped?

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, and there are a number of routes to that. For communications data, he will be aware that no warrant is required. He will also be aware that, with the sole exception of evidence collected by local councils under RIPA, there is no judicial oversight of any kind at any stage. I am not aware of exceptions to that, and that is a weakness. There is an internal process—I do not doubt the good intentions of the people who work on this—but there is no independent external oversight from a judicial process, which is what many of us would like to see.

Let me return to the ISC. It works extremely hard, but its reports are redacted by the security services and the Prime Minister, and it is hard to know whether that is done in the interests of national security and not just to avoid embarrassment. Sir Francis Richards, a former senior intelligence official, has said that it is

“not a very good idea”

for an ex-Minister to head it. There is the problem of people being asked to scrutinise the consequences of decisions that they made, and that makes it hard to develop the right sort of relationship.

The ISC is under-resourced and not properly accountable to Parliament. There is a real issue to understanding the detailed technological components of much of this. I am not certain whether there is enough support to ensure that members understand the consequences of fake secure socket layer certificates and how phishing or man-in-the-middle attacks work. I am sure that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) will be happy to explain them when she speaks later.

We need better scrutiny generally and not just of the Intelligence and Security Committee. We keep hearing messages about the risk of “going dark”—we heard all about that in relation to the draft Communications Data Bill. It is simply not true. There is far more information available now to the intelligence and security community and to the police than at any time in the past. People now carry mobile phone devices that keep track of where they are almost constantly. I do not blame the agencies. Of course I can see the argument that there will always be for having more information, but we must provide a counterbalance. Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, said:

“It’s very important for our intelligence services to have a kind of oversight which people have confidence in. I think that it may mean it is now the time to look again at the oversight.”

I agree with her.

We have seen further calls for even more information to be collected. The previous Government established the interception modernisation programme to create a vast database designed to log all details of text messages, phone calls and e-mails in the UK. In the interests of cross-party unity, I will not go on about other authoritarian measures: the drive for 90-day detention without charge, ID cards, control orders and allowing people to be forcibly relocated. They are all now things of the past, and I am pleased that that is the case.

Given such concerns, I was pleased with much of the coalition agreement. We Liberal Democrats insisted on a particular element, which was a commitment to ending

“the storage of internet and email records without good reason”.

That was accepted by both parts of the coalition. I am not sure whether the Home Secretary saw that, because she then pushed ahead with the draft Communications Data Bill, which would have required the storing of e-mail and internet records for everybody, which blows a hole through the idea of “without good reason”. It was envisaged that an extra £1.8 billion would be spent over 10 years to keep those extra records. That would have allowed the Home Secretary to require internet service providers to keep track of every website that everyone in the country goes to—everything that we do on Facebook or Google—with a huge growth in surveillance.

[Martin Horwood]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Huppert]

I want to make a little more progress. I am sure Members will want to speak later.

The Deputy Prime Minister insisted that the draft Bill be scrutinised, and the Joint Committee that did so produced a damning report. It stated that the Bill paid

“insufficient attention to the duty to respect the right to privacy, and goes much further than it need or should for the purpose of providing necessary and justifiable official access to communications data.”

The report was a unanimous cross-House report, which described information provided by the Home Office as “fanciful and misleading”. I am pleased to say that that Bill is now dead.

We said that the information was misleading before we knew that the intelligence and security services already had access to much of the information that they claimed was missing. To quote the Chair of the Joint Committee, the former Conservative Home Office Minister, Lord Blencathra:

“Some people were very economical with the actuality. I think we would have regarded this as highly, highly relevant. I personally am annoyed we were not given this information.”

The Home Office needs to be clear with Parliament when asking for new powers.

Even our current laws are incredibly broad. Although we have very welcome reassurances from the Foreign Secretary that the agencies stick to the law—I absolutely credit that—the law is vague and broad. Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984, for example, allows secret directions

“of a general character”

that are

“in the interests of national security or relations with the government of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom.”

So if the US asks for something, we are supposed to provide it. The information does not have to be provided to Parliament, and it gags whoever the directions are served on.

When the Joint Committee looked at this, we had to admit that we could not find any information about how the power was being used. There was no ability to have any oversight. RIPA has drawn lots of criticism for its widespread use. It was originally introduced to take account of technological change, but it is so broad that it led to serious abuses of privacy. It allowed council officials to put children and their parents under surveillance at home and in their daily movements to find out whether they lived in a particular school catchment area. Most of us would not think that that was in the same vein as counter-terrorism. That is clearly disproportionate.

So what now? Before we even consider new powers, whether explicitly granted or acquired through new technology, we need a pause. We need a proper and full investigation into the powers already available to the intelligence and security services, and it has to be done competently and with an element of independence. We should commission independent, post-legislative scrutiny of both RIPA and the Intelligence Services Act 1994, and other related legislation, to see how they interact with each other. We would then have a clear, open understanding of where we stand now.

As Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation said:

“the current legislation, including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, should be re-examined and rewritten to fit the current situation.”

That is not a radical suggestion. In the US, the Obama Administration have realised that proper and competent oversight is needed, and he has established the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which includes those within the Washington system and those outside it. It includes people with experience of working for not-for-profit organisations. It is citizen engagement and shows trust. We could follow that model and create such a board.

We could do much more to fix the loss of trust and confidence. We could publish, as happens in the US, the legal opinions used to underpin the surveillance framework. We could provide a clearer account of such expenditure and lift the legal restrictions on British companies publishing transparency reports about the requests that they receive. We should proactively publish information about the surveillance requests made: in bulk, the broad purpose, with no identifying details.

In the long term, we should look at signing up to the international principles on the application of human rights to communications surveillance. The 13 principles are legality, legitimate aim, necessity, adequacy, proportionality, competent judicial authority, due process, transparency, public oversight, integrity of communications, safeguards for international co-operation and safeguards against illegitimate access.

We should absolutely defend the right of our intelligence and security services to go after the bad guys, to use the powers that they have to protect us and make the UK and the world a safer place. However, it should not be at a disproportionate cost to the liberty and privacy that form the very foundations of our society.

The work that our intelligence and security services carry out on behalf of us all is valued and important, but we should not give them carte blanche. We would not want that. We need to have an open debate about what the rules are, what is acceptable and what we consider goes too far. It has taken us too long to get into this debate, but now that we are here, with so many right hon. and hon. Members, I hope we are now firmly here to stay in this discussion.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Julian Smith]

I am going to push on, but it is important to say that the intelligence services are doing critical work in both categories, and we need to support that work.

On the issue of the documents that The Guardian holds, when hon. Members talk about prosecutions not happening and things not really being that bad, I ask them to look at the online discussions that Guardian editors have had. They have admitted to sending internationally the most detailed documents and underlying data about GCHQ specifically. I do not want to talk too much about David Miranda today, but his data were on a games console. Those data, in data dumps throughout the world, are still out there, and hackers claim that they have access to it. The Independent, which also had access to those documents, started reporting on them but then stopped because it realised that to do so was problematic. The issue with The Guardian is current; the data are out there and are a danger to our national security.

The third element that I want to discuss today is the fact that The Guardian is not talking to the Government. If it really was confident in its position, and I believe that there is quite a lot of tension at The Guardian on the approach it has taken, it would have a discussion with the Government, who have been very clear. Look at the witness statements for the Miranda trial. They have been so careful about ensuring that they do not interfere with The Guardian as a newspaper and with its right to report. However, The Guardian should come forward now and tell the Government what intelligence data it has overseas and where those intelligence data are. Is there identifying information about our agents in the data? What protections are there in The Guardian offices to look after that material?

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I could pick up on a lot of his points. He says that The Guardian should be talking to the Government about this. Is he aware that it has been talking to the DA notice secretary? They have been in touch for many months, talking about these things. Does he think that part of the onus should be on the Government to provide advice if they are concerned about such things? The Guardian, as I understand it, is quite happy to talk about how to make sure the data are secure, and frankly, the NSA should never have lost them in the first place.

[Julian Smith]

If my hon. Friend looked at witness statement 1 by Oliver Robbins, he would see the approach to the Miranda trial. He would see the approach that The Guardian has taken, which, essentially, in the first two reports in June, was not to get clearance from the Government. Following a reasonable discussion with the Government, that was just ignored and documents were sent overseas.

I urge Mr Rusbridger today to begin an open dialogue with the Government to tell them where the dumps of data are, and to come clean on whether they contain information that could lead to the identification of our security agents. I also urge Mr Rusbridger, his board and his editorial team to talk to the Government before publishing any further reports on our security services, intelligence gathering and our activity, because The Guardian, which had every right to report on the issue and has raised important topics of debate in a digital, global, interesting way, with good journalism, has threatened the security of our country, and stands guilty today, potentially, of treasonous behaviour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Meacher]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman is correct, but the question is whether that is an effective way for the legislature to make the choice. It is all very well to say that there is a provision that will work if it is used diligently and systematically by the House. I submit that it is not, and that we need to change it.

[Dr Huppert]

It might help the right hon. Gentleman to know that clause 1 of the Justice and Security Act 2013 states:

“A person is not eligible to become a member of the ISC unless the person…is nominated for membership by the Prime Minister, and…is not a Minister of the Crown.”

[Mr Meacher]

Of course, that is the point. The House can reject a name that is proposed by the Prime Minister. It cannot propose its own name, as happens with the other Select Committees.

When the Committee has completed an inquiry, often, of course, at the behest of the Prime Minister—although I am aware that it can pursue its own investigations—it sends its report directly to the Prime Minister. That is a secret back channel within the existing power structure, with no direct accountability to the public. The Prime Minister can modify the report in any way he or she chooses and then publish it without any indication of the changes, or publish it in redacted form, or not publish it at all. That is not serious scrutiny. It is a safe cover for the Prime Minister, to give the impression that a difficult and sometimes, for the Government, embarrassing issue has been properly investigated, when, in fact, MI5 or GCHQ disclose to the Committee only what they choose, and the Prime Minister reveals what he or she wants to. Genuine accountability in such matters is needed, and is long overdue.

The Intelligence and Security Committee should, like all other Select Committees, be elected by Parliament, although I think that the Government should choose the Chair. Where the security services are unwilling to disclose documents on national security grounds, the Committee should have the right to ask the Information Commissioner to review the documents and decide whether their disclosure would genuinely put national security at risk—in which case of course there would be no question of their being revealed—as opposed to merely being inconvenient to the security services or the Government, as has so often proved the case in the past. The Information Commissioner’s decision would be final, and the Committee’s report, once finalised, would be issued to the House for public consumption, not to the Prime Minister.

It will be said that we should trust the security services, which look after the nation’s safety—a vital role—and let them get on with the job. We did that, of course, and then found out, not from them but from the Snowden files, what the NSA in the US and GCHQ in Britain were really up to, including monitoring the phones of Angela Merkel and 35 other world leaders—one wonders how much else—and that all assurances about privacy were not worth the e-mails that they were written on. The Intelligence and Security Committee never found out or told us. We were assured by its current Chair—whom I greatly respect—that the security services always acted strictly in accordance with the law, that all operations were officially approved and that there was nothing to worry about. It was only later that we discovered that in fact GCHQ, through the Tempora programme, had devised a way of obviating all that.

It is high time, not for the ISC to tweak its existing work programme to respond to the global furore, as seems to be proposed, but for an independent committee of inquiry to be established to examine the issue thoroughly and systematically, taking full account of international experience, particularly in the United States, and to report to the House, not to the Prime Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I am sorry, but I cannot at this stage.

Given our willingness to have our first public hearing with the intelligence chiefs next week in front of the cameras, plus other public sessions, as well as the new powers we are already exercising, I ask right hon. and hon. Members to test whether we use such powers properly. They should not say that we do not have those powers in the first place, because there is not a single new power that they have suggested should be given to the Intelligence and Security Committee that we do not now have.

[Dr Huppert]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I cannot, unfortunately.

Right hon. and hon. Members should by all means scrutinise whether we use the powers properly, but they should please do so on the basis of knowledge about the Act that Parliament approved within the past 12 months.

--- Later in debate ---

[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 Huppert]

indicated assent.

[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—

--- Later in debate ---

[James Brokenshire]

I say to the hon. Gentleman that publicly discussing sensitive techniques and sensitive tactics of our intelligence agencies is simply not appropriate in terms of safeguarding their work. However, I can also say to him very clearly that arrangements are in place to ensure that GCHQ neither obtains nor discloses any material except so far as necessary in pursuit of its statutory functions, as defined in the Intelligence Services Act 1994, which he will be very well aware of.

As far as interception activity by GCHQ is concerned, GCHQ operates at all times in accordance with RIPA. That is not just a statement; GCHQ’s activity is overseen by the commissioners, who analyse its work in detail. They also analyse some of the codes of practice that the agencies have in place to ensure their adherence to RIPA.

Such levels of assurance are in place within our oversight regime, which I believe is very effective because our intelligence agencies’ activity is overseen by a greater variety of bodies than many other areas of Government business. At the parliamentary level, the ISC examines the policy, administration, past operations and expenditure of the intelligence agencies and parts of the wider Government intelligence community. Indeed, the ISC’s position has been strengthened by the Justice and Security Act 2013, which has only been passed into law through this House very recently.

[Dr Huppert]

The Minister makes the extremely good point that it is “past operations” that can be looked at, and there are constraints on what the ISC can look at; it does not have a completely free rein on operational matters. What happens if an operation lasts for many, many years? At what stage is there any sort of scrutiny of that?

Immigration Controls

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I am delighted that this debate was granted by Mr Speaker and delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby. I am also pleased that my hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration can respond to the debate, because this is quite a busy day for his Department as regards immigration. I commend him and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary for the Immigration Bill, which will be debated this afternoon. There is no doubt that we are providing the warm-up act this morning—the opportunity for hon. Members to sharpen and master the arguments for this afternoon. On that note, I welcome the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and congratulate him on his new role. I can assure him that I shall be supplying some facts and information that may equip him for the debate this afternoon.

Conservative Ministers in the Home Office have made great progress in the last three and a half years in tackling the problems with our immigration system and the atrocious legacy inherited from Labour. One of the biggest concerns for my constituents is immigration controls. In the run-up to and during the general election in 2010, it was the No. 1 issue raised with me in my constituency—the issue on which my constituents were pressing for action. That is not surprising, because it is a rural constituency in the east of England, so it has many issues with seasonal agricultural workers and migrants coming in. My constituents wanted, and are eager to see, a wide range of effective reforms and policies put in place to keep our borders secure and the public safe.

I want to draw attention to a number of issues, particularly the ongoing consequences of Labour’s failures; cases from my constituency in which the immigration system has not worked effectively; the need for further reforms to remove foreign criminals, prisoners and terrorists; reforms to human rights laws; EU immigration, the free movement directive and transitional controls on Bulgaria and Romania; and the need to ensure that we have an immigration system that, importantly, lets in wealth creators, entrepreneurs and people who will make a positive contribution to this country, while preventing from coming in, and removing, those who should not be here.

We can appreciate what the Government have already done to deal with many of the problems in our immigration system and understand what more needs to be done only by understanding what went wrong with the system under the Labour Government. The Minister is fully aware of the past and the appalling legacy left by the Labour Government, and no doubt continues to deal daily with many of the consequences, such as the backlog of cases and appeals. It is a fact that immigration controls were ineffective. Immigration numbers had spiralled out of all proportion. Transitional controls had not been placed on the A8 countries when they joined the EU. Labour passed the Human Rights Act 1998, which gave illegal immigrants, foreign criminals and many taxpayer-funded lawyers new excuses to block deportation. We are still living with many of the consequences of that on a daily basis.

Three quarters of the new jobs created in the UK economy after 1997 went to people born overseas, and a monumental backlog of asylum cases had built up. Almost 500,000 asylum cases, which the previous Government failed to process effectively, accumulated and, as we now know, the figures were massaged to reduce the backlog, rather than people being sent home. We now know that there were not effective systems of control over management or even the processing of data at that stage.

I have an example from Witham of a constituent who came to Britain as an asylum seeker from Albania in 2002, applied to extend his leave to remain in January 2006 and, almost eight years on, is still waiting for his case to be determined. Such delays are wrong. It should never be forgotten that under the previous Government so many cases—too many—were left unresolved. It has been estimated that more than 3 million immigrants came to live in Britain during Labour’s time in office, and illegal immigrants could add another million to that. In Labour’s 1997 manifesto, it pledged that a Labour Government would

“ensure swift and fair decisions on whether someone can stay or go”,

but, as we now know, there was an open-door policy inviting everyone to come to Britain, and our border control system was completely dysfunctional and broken.

The Office for National Statistics has estimated that the UK’s population, which is about 63 million, could reach as much as 75 million by 2035, with two thirds of that increase arising out of the consequences of immigration. In my county of Essex, between 2004 and 2012, the estimated number of non-UK-born residents increased from 69,000, which was 5% of the population, to 104,000, which is over 7.5%. Across the UK in the same period, the number of non-UK-born residents rose from 5.2 million, which is the equivalent of 9% of the population, in 2004 to nearly 7.7 million in 2012, which is equivalent to more than 12% of the UK population.

As we have seen in newspaper reports this morning, population increases and, obviously, increases in immigration have an impact on our public services and infrastructure, but the strains placed on the country’s infrastructure and public services by the numbers that I have referred to have been kept hidden. Only now is the full extent of the facts emerging. A report prepared by the Department for Communities and Local Government in August 2007, which was not cleared for circulation—it was published only earlier this year, in response to a written parliamentary question—highlighted the fact that new arrivals

“can affect resource planning and make school and classroom management difficult”,

that there is

“anecdotal evidence of recent migration placing pressure on the availability and affordability of rented accommodation”,

and that the

“number of A8 migrants claiming childcare benefits, tax credits and income support are all rising.”

Immigration is not the only cause of pressure on our public services, housing and infrastructure, but it is a factor that cannot be ignored. The previous Government tried to shut down debate on this issue, but it is valid for the Government today to have this discussion. That reflects the fact that they deserve credit for their commitment to addressing these problems. Conservative Ministers can be proud of the actions that they have already taken to regain control of the broken immigration system. Net migration is down by one third. It is heading closer to the Government’s target, which is to bring it below 100,000 by 2015. The number of immigrants coming to Britain is at its lowest since 2001. Interestingly, under the previous Conservative Government, between 1991 and 1997, the inflow of migrants to the UK ranged between 266,000 and 329,000—a modest level—with annual net migration not exceeding 77,000, but after that, under Labour, inward migration increased year on year, in five of the next six years, from 391,000 in 1998 to 589,000 in 2004. It stayed above half a million until last year.

The UK Border Agency, one of the most poorly performing and discredited Government agencies, is being abolished and replaced. Bogus colleges have been exposed and student visa abuses tackled. New controls on the family migration route to tackle sham marriages—quite rightly—and to protect vulnerable people have been introduced and are welcome. The new Immigration Bill goes further and does more to control our borders and immigration flows. I welcome the measures, as my constituents do, to make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to come to Britain and live in this country. There is also the contribution that temporary migrants will be required to make to the NHS; we are seeing that in the newspapers just this morning.

We also have to cut the appeal routes. We have to make removals of illegal immigrants and foreign criminals easier and clamp down on the abuses of article 8 of the European convention on human rights and judicial activism that we have seen across the country. I would like to come on to some constituency cases that I have experienced.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The hon. Lady is listing a catalogue of problems with immigration, but does she agree that there are also huge benefits from migration, which companies highlight, and that legitimate, legal immigrants deserve fair and prompt access to this country, so that they can come in and contribute to it?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I touched on earlier, immigrants are entrepreneurs and business people, and immigration touches on the skills agenda—another issue we could debate for a long time. Where people make a positive contribution, we should find the best routes—the right routes—to make them welcome and support them in visa applications and so on. We must be proactive on that front, but we can only do that and change the system in their favour once we have tackled the catalogue of problems, some of which I have highlighted.

The devastation left by the Labour Government was so great that we cannot overestimate the challenges faced by the Government and the Minister. Repairing the damage will no doubt take a long time. Labour’s legacy can still be seen across the country. I am sure that many hon. and right hon. Members see cases in their constituencies involving immigrants who have been deemed to have no right to remain in the UK, but, quite wrongly, pursue every legal avenue to remain here. In my constituency, there have been cases of immigrants who have outstayed their welcome. Such cases demonstrate the systemic failures of the controls put in place under the previous Government. I could reel off many cases, but I have a couple that I would like to highlight.

One lady from the Philippines was granted permission to enter the country in 2006 on a 48-month work permit to work in a care home. Since then, her husband, family and children, who have gone to local schools, have all come over. Once the visa expired and she was asked to leave, little action was taken, so the family remain in the UK. Last summer, the case was brought to my attention and an appeal to remain in the UK was rejected. To avoid deportation, the family lodged a further application to remain in the UK on human rights grounds in January this year, which was refused in June. The case is now going on and on. In July, they lodged another appeal, which is still pending. If that appeal is rejected, the family may undertake another appeal and prolong the process even more. Surely that cannot be right.

Another case in my constituency that has been ongoing for years involves a family from Nigeria who are here without any right to remain. They were informed that they should leave the UK two years ago, but they, too, embarked on a series of applications and appeals. Such actions are all about delay and prolonging the process for people who have no right whatever to remain in the country. That undermines public confidence in the immigration system. A stop must be put to repeated applications and appeals.

I welcome the measures in the Immigration Bill to limit the number of appeals that immigrants make. I urge the Minister to look at ways of going further in speeding up cases—the issue is the efficiency and effectiveness with which cases are determined—so that those who are deemed to have no right to remain in the UK can be removed without delay. Once someone has lost their case or appeal, unless there are genuinely exceptional circumstances, there is no reason why they should not leave voluntarily or be deported, if that has to be done, within a couple of weeks. They should certainly not be here for a prolonged period. That would obviously restore public confidence in the system and send a powerful signal to those who have abused the system. It would send a message that Britain is not a soft touch and will take tough action.

I also welcome the approach that will be taken to deporting foreign criminals before their appeals are held. I ask the Minister to consider extending that approach to other persons staying in the UK illegally and involved in repeat applications and appeals. An aspect of immigration controls that greatly concerns my constituents and the wider public is the way foreign offenders, prisoners and terrorists are able to remain in the country, despite the overt threat they pose to public safety and national security. The Abu Qatada case is symbolic of the wider problem with immigration controls and human rights laws: judicial activism and judgments from Europe that, frankly, undermine this country. We should be able to remove the likes of Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, who killed a 12-year-old girl, and serial Somali criminals Abdisamad Adow Sufi and Abdiaziz Ibrahim Elmi, without the courts and human rights laws interfering and our courts being lectured on what we should be doing.

Killers, sex offenders, violent criminals, persistent offenders and supporters of terrorists should face the automatic expectation of deportation. They should not expect to be protected by the ridiculous interpretations of human rights laws that the European Court of Human Rights, and sometimes even our own courts, provides. We should have a prison-to-plane approach, whereby foreign national offenders who have served custodial sentences are removed. When they leave prison, they should be taken to an airport and deported at the earliest opportunity. My constituents and the British public would feel greatly reassured if they knew that such dangerous criminals were not able to set foot again in our country and their communities. I welcome the fact that the Government are taking the matter seriously; that is shown in the way that they are initiating deportation proceedings sooner. As a result, the average time taken to remove a foreign national offender following the completion of a custodial sentence was lowered to 77 days in 2011. We still have 11,000 foreign national offenders in our prisons and thousands more who avoid custodial sentences.

The Minister knows of my concern about the fact that more than 3,100 foreign nationals who are subject to deportation orders are still in the country. Shockingly, that includes 2,300 people who have been on the list for more than a year, 25 of whom have been here for more than 10 years. Every day, hard-working British taxpayers are left to pick up the hefty bill for legal costs and other expenses for those individuals. We must put an end to it, and if that means going further on the Human Rights Act, reforming the European convention on human rights and taking unilateral action to defend parliamentary sovereignty from European judicial activism, my constituents and the British public would expect nothing less from a Conservative Government acting in the national interest.

I urge the Minister and his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice to look at ways to deport European prisoners to their countries to serve their sentences. As he is aware, the Council of Europe convention on the transfer of sentenced persons enables European national prisoners to be deported to serve their sentences in the country of their nationality, but unfortunately, it is a voluntary agreement. There are 4,000 or so European national prisoners in our jails, but only 138 applications were received in 2011, with 127 being referred to other jurisdictions for consideration. The numbers being deported under the convention are too small. In 2007, 111 prisoners were deported, but that number is declining and has since dropped, meaning that not even 1% of European national prisoners serve their sentences in their own countries. Slightly more than 1,000 foreign national offenders from the European economic area were deported in 2011. I hope that the Minister will make that issue a priority in his discussions in Europe and seek to secure the deportation of more European national offenders.

The final aspect of immigration controls I shall raise relates to immigration from Europe. The free movement of goods and peoples is an important principle of the European Union, but the unrestricted access given to European nationals has added significantly to our population and the strain on public services. Of the 2.7 million residents in this country who were born in other EU countries, 1.1 million are estimated to have been born in those countries that joined the EU since 2004. In 2003, more than 500,000 nationals from other EU countries and 50,000 from countries about to join in 2004 were employed in the UK. By 2011, that number more than doubled to 1.29 million, which included more than 700,000 nationals from the 2004 intake of member states and more than 500,000 from the pre-2004 accession.

On top of that, there are an estimated 600,000 economically inactive EU nationals in the UK, many of whom will be accessing public services and benefits. This morning, I read that one person in 25 claiming jobseeker’s allowance is an EU immigrant, so the pressure on the public purse and public services is clearly enormous. Meanwhile, child benefit is being paid in respect of 40,000 children living in other European countries.

It cannot be right that our country faces an uphill battle, and legal action with Europe, to reduce some of the benefits being paid to EU nationals. I encourage the Minister and the Government to consider how we can renegotiate the position with Europe to bring common sense and sanity to our immigration controls, so that they do not prevent the working of the free market but enable us to limit immigration, prevent abuses of free movement rights and remove those who should not be here and are pushing the boundaries by accessing benefits and public services.

I also press the Government to make greater use of the powers already available through the free movement directive to restrict the right of entry and the right of residence on the grounds of public policy, public security or public health. It is almost inevitable that we would be challenged by the European Commission for doing so, but there are many cases, especially involving European national criminals, where we must take a firm approach and give the public confidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

It says much about 21st-century Britain that my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) should have introduced this debate. Although I am a proud Englishman, that is only part of my story. My late mother was twice a refugee by age 15, having been born during the early months of the war in Breslau, or Wroclaw, in what was then Germany and is now Poland. By age 15 she ended up in West Germany, where a few years later she met my father, who was serving in the British Army. Immigration has had an impact on me, given that one of my parents was an immigrant to this country, and both my hon. Friend’s parents were immigrants to this country. We love this country and the opportunities that it has given us. Despite much of what she said, we do not necessarily see immigration simply as a problem; it has some very positive sides. It is important that those elements are put on the record from time to time as well, and I shall endeavour to do so in my contribution.

We are going to hear the mantra that net migration has been cut by a third. It has become a key campaigning tool in recent months for the Conservative party, and it will no doubt be heralded as one of the Government’s central achievements as we approach the 2015 general election. Undoubtedly, important work has been done to crack down on some obvious immigration abuses, and rightly, as trust in the whole immigration system has reached an all-time low among our fellow Britons.

The Government should be applauded for the work that they have done to clamp down on bogus colleges, sham marriages, fake students, health tourists and the like. I noticed only this morning that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health rightly announced that we should not become an international health service. We should be proud that the NHS is free at the point of delivery. I have been an MP for central London for the past 12 years, and I have no doubt that health tourism has become increasingly acute in some areas, such as Paddington in my constituency. My constituents are suffering, and hard-working individuals’ taxes are not being used for their own purposes.

The Government have also been striving to address some of the pull factors that have hitherto made the UK such an appealing destination for those who wish to abuse generous western welfare and benefit systems. Nevertheless, we should be wary of the notion that the imposition of a cap alone and a broader clampdown mean job done on immigration. For all the talk about the squeeze on numbers, all too many Britons experience a different daily reality on the streets where they live and read a different story in their newspapers. Meanwhile, precisely the type of person whom we seek to attract to our nation—successful business people, entrepreneurs, investors, the highly skilled, top students and high-spending tourists—have encountered great difficulties entering the UK, just as we have been rightly discussing the need to compete in the global race. I fear that the disparity between the headline figures and reality is breeding ever more cynicism while doing economic damage.

I appreciate that time is relatively tight in this popular debate, so I will focus on three key concerns of mine. The first is the entry of business people to the UK, which as one might imagine is an acute day-to-day constituency issue for me as the Member for Cities of London and Westminster. The second is student visas and the third is the specific downsides in my central London constituency of the EU migration to which my hon. Friend referred.

Let me start with new migration broadly. As long ago as January 2007, I led a debate in the House of Commons on the possible impact on London of the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union. In particular, I sought to increase funding to Westminster City council, which was, even at that stage, being overburdened by the significant increase in rough sleeping, crime and antisocial behaviour following the 2004 accession of the so-called A8 countries, such as Poland and the Czech Republic.

Unfortunately, the things of which I warned at the time have come to pass as Romania and Bulgaria edged closer to fully fledged EU membership. Many of us have seen at first hand the Roma gypsy encampments that have sprung up around Marble Arch; others appeared in the vicinity of Victoria station during last year’s Olympics. Some of the people living in those encampments were part of an organised begging operation, deliberately targeting the lucrative west end tourist market in the Marble Arch area. That encampment has since become merely the most visible example of a growing problem, with similar camps appearing outside the Imperial War museum—south of the river, near the constituency of the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey)—and around the 9/11 memorial in Grosvenor square, to name just two sites here in central London.

Meanwhile I am receiving, and continue to receive, weekly reports from exasperated constituents who find spontaneous bedrooms in the doorways of their homes, as well as litter, excrement and worse in garden squares. There is also the issue of constituents and tourists who come into central London being harassed by aggressive beggars daily. Some local residents have even witnessed such issues in broad daylight. The people living in those eyesore encampments have, in my view, no intention of legally exercising their treaty rights to be here. Nevertheless, due to international treaties, particularly the EU-related treaties, they are incredibly difficult to remove, as the Minister is well aware.

Westminster City council and our local borough policing teams are now diverting vast resources to street cleaning operations, translation services and operations to tackle begging and organised crime. They are even spending vast sums of taxpayer’s money on transport to send problem migrants back to their countries of origin. Of course, little can be done if those individuals, within a matter of days, decide to return to the UK.

It is mostly local taxpayers who are paying the financial cost of national policy decisions. Until such problems are tackled, and until we find a way of stemming the vast tide of people coming from the EU, I am afraid that many of the Government’s declarations to have got a grip on immigration will mean precious little to average Britons. We therefore risk introducing a whole lot of cynicism to the system.

A number of constituents have written to alert me to schemes in ailing southern European economies to give non-EU migrants a fast track to citizenship if they invest in their nations. They know that a prize such as citizenship is enticing because it gives the applicant the potential prospect of moving to any country in the European Union.

It is terrible. Day in, day out, we see awfully desperate people from war-torn parts of northern Africa crossing the Mediterranean. We have seen the particular tragedies, which I suspect are only the tip of the iceberg, around the coast of Italy and Malta in recent weeks. The truth, however, is that many such individuals are able to make their way into the European Union. As a result, they could end up on these shores as well as in other parts of the Union within a matter of weeks or months. That provides yet another example of how difficult it will be to keep headline net migration numbers under control without resorting to the clampdown that we have seen in the past on highly skilled people from non-EU nations.

That brings me to my other concerns. I continue to be lobbied by business people and those in the education sector about the coalition’s visa regime, which continues to deter the highly skilled from engaging with the UK. I am aware that the Chancellor has made it clear in China that he sees that to be a problem, and that he wants to try to smooth it out.

Since the coalition took office in 2010, it has rightly made building the United Kingdom’s trade and export sector a core part of its economic strategy. That must be the case. We must have a sustainable recovery, which will not be built on ultra-low interest rates and a further boost in the housing market. It will have to be through investment from abroad in the globalised world in which we live, as well as ensuring that the export sector goes from strength to strength, particularly among small and medium-sized enterprises. It is a matter of some national shame that when it comes to China and India, two countries with which we have had long-standing connections, it is the Germans and, to a large extent, even the French who are teaching us some lessons. We need to ensure that we provide export credit guarantees that make it easier for our SMEs to thrive.

Foreign investment in the UK must and will continue to remain a hugely important source of financing, helping to support infrastructure development, employment and economic growth. However, those who wish to do business in the UK face a series of unnecessary obstacles, despite the Government’s best intentions. Such barriers include the perceived complexity of the UK visa system. I know that we will get some improvements, but there will still be that perception about time lags. It deters high-value business investors, visitors and workers. Along with resourcing issues at the UK’s borders and within certain embassies overseas, and the perceived lack of capacity at UK airports, that issue is potentially problematic.

I am not suggesting that we should just make life easy for tourists who come to this country, but there are some high net worth individuals—global citizens—living in places such as China who will come to London and spend £40,000 or £50,000 in one afternoon at Selfridges or Harrods. It seems madness that we are saying, “Don’t come here. Go and spend that in the salons of Milan, Rome or Paris.” That is the message that has hitherto gone out. I know that there are some improvements, which the Minister will no doubt tell us about.

The City of London corporation, in my constituency, regularly receives complaints from business. It believes that practical steps could be taken to improve the first interaction with our visa system. They include availability of own-language application forms and Schengen equivalence. The City corporation welcomes the announcement on the latter following the Chancellor’s recent visit to China, but the ambiguity of the Home Office’s subsequent statement has also been noted. The Government must work swiftly and clearly to make that announcement a reality.

Chinese applicants may have to travel up to 500 miles to appear in person at a visa-processing centre. Even after April 2013, applicants have had to submit to fingerprinting and face a non-refundable charge of £70. They have also had to supply a letter from their employer to prove that they have leave from work to travel. It is again perhaps not surprising that one study found that nearly a third of Chinese potential visitors abandon the UK visa process and instead visit other destinations, many of which may be in Europe.

The future is not just about China. There are anecdotal reports that, in countries such as Brazil, applicants are faced with taking several days off work to get visas processed. Anyone who needs to travel regularly is understandably reluctant to hand over their passport for what might be an unspecified period. The City corporation has been told that in some centres, passports can be surrendered for up to three to six months without feedback from the UK Border Agency as to when to expect a return of documents. While I would not say that that is an acute problem, as Member of Parliament for this constituency, that issue is not entirely unknown to me.

In contrast with the UK, key competitor countries have, since 2010, sought to simplify their procedures. For example, a visa for Australia can generally be processed in just 24 hours. The United States, which has been widely criticised for its visa bureaucracy, particularly in the aftermath of the terrible events of September 2001, has also overhauled its systems since President Obama gave the State Department 60 days to reassess its visa regimes for Brazil and China.

Before I turn to student visas, I must declare an interest as I have, for the past eight and a half years, been a member of the advisory board of the London School of Commerce, which is a private higher education establishment.

Britain’s world-beating education sector draws fee-paying students from across the globe, which we should be incredibly proud of. The standards and our high regard for our exam system mean that a British degree is regarded highly across the globe. Many young students who come to study will be in this country for only a short time—a year or two, and perhaps staying for a year after graduating to embark on their first taste of employment. They will return to their home nations as tremendous ambassadors for the UK for decades to come as they build wealth in their homelands. A 2011 Home Affairs Committee report suggested that no fewer than 27 contemporary foreign Heads of State were educated in the UK.

Our universities have hitherto been exceptionally good at tapping that ever-growing market, with a 9.9% market share in 2009 and export earnings calculated at about £7.9 billion. The value of international students to London as well as the UK, on the Government’s own figures, is believed to exceed £20 billion, and there is huge potential for that to grow.

I accept that there is no cap on international student numbers, but the Government’s explicit objective has been to reduce student numbers to bring net migration below 100,000 by the next election, in May 2015. The treatment of student and post-study work visas has become a regular complaint among top universities in my constituency, not just in relation to any of the bucket shop language schools or sham colleges. At one élite central London institution in my constituency, the numbers of applications from Indian and Pakistani students for postgraduate taught programmes are down by 14% and 11% respectively, as future employment prospects are a key motivator in those markets.

Another institution faces recruitment difficulties in disciplines such as accounting, economics, finance, management and law, and is finding it increasingly difficult to obtain transfers for high-level researchers to maintain an academic staff of the highest international repute and pedigree. Prospective overseas staff now perceive that it is more difficult to get a visa for the UK, and prefer to move to the US or Australia instead. There are other complaints about what is regarded as a very bureaucratic system, with enormous forms to be completed, and extortionate visa fees, which compare unfavourably with those of our western competitors.

We should not underestimate our global talent. One reason that our universities are so strong is that some of the finest and best academics work here. They should not just be regarded as overseas employees, because the reality is that many academics have to spend time abroad. They may have a visa to come to this country, but they need to go to a range of different events abroad to lecture and to find out more, and the sheer bureaucracy that administrative departments of our universities have to go through, daily marking where academics are at any one time, is an increasingly strong disincentive.

[Dr Huppert]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman is saying. He is raising some real concerns, but is he also aware that academics find other processes frustrating, such as the fact that to be paid a couple of hundred pounds to examine a PhD viva somewhere, they have to go through the bureaucracy of proving their immigration status? That is completely disproportionate, because nobody comes to this country to get rich examining PhDs.

[Mark Field]

I sincerely hope that that is not the case. The hon. Gentleman, who represents a prime university town, will be well aware of such concerns. I am sure that such matters give the impression that we are not open for business in the way that we should be if we are to appeal to the brightest and best across the globe. It has to be said that many fledgling but highly reputable universities across the world are looking to attract some of the brightest talent in this country with absolutely open arms, and they would certainly not provide the evidence of reciprocal negativity that we see in elements of a bureaucratic, tick-box culture in the UKBA and the Home Office. It is a cliché to say that a reputation may take many years to build up but can be lost in an instant, but there is a real risk that the UK will lose its hard-won reputation as a country that welcomes trade, investment and the most talented students from across the world, at a time when the need for that international expertise and capital is very high.

I believe that there is a need for a change of rhetoric, because misconceptions are as damaging as actual practical barriers. The Government rightly wish to ensure that the UK is open for business. A passionate restatement of that goal both here this morning and in the main Chamber this afternoon, combined with some practical improvements to the visa process and the operation of our borders, should help to generate significant trade, investment and diplomatic benefits.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby, and to follow the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). I agree with many of his concerns about what our policies are doing and about many people being put off from applying to come here. The issue is not only the facts of the process, but the rhetoric and the impression that is given, as will always be true of any complicated system.

Let me give my assessment. I think that legal immigration has a substantial benefit financially and in the generation of jobs. We also benefit culturally from people coming here and bringing an international mixture, as we saw in the fantastic sporting achievements in the Olympics of people who have not, or whose families have not, been here their entire lives. We in this country benefit from immigration.

We need a system that works, that is fair and fast, and that discriminates accurately between people coming here legally and those trying to break the rules, but that is not happening. The Government must actively promote our country to the world to encourage people who would benefit the UK to come here—we have seen a bit of that in relation to China—rather than send out messages about our being so determined to clamp down on immigration and so fixated on a numerical target that we are prepared to accept the consequence of driving people away.

Like the hon. Gentleman, I find that when I talk to companies in our fantastic and world-leading high-tech centre in Cambridge, one of the two top issues they almost invariably raise is concern about the immigration system. Sometimes the issue of transport is raised first, but normally it is immigration, because those companies are trying to get staff and are experiencing delays. Bad decision making holds them up. If errors are made, they have to let people go: they simply cannot wait, because they need staff who can travel.

Companies sometimes cannot get customers to come to the UK. One company I recently visited told me that prospective clients in the US whom it wants to invite over to look at a product, which sells perhaps for £500,000, are increasingly not US citizens, but citizens from China, India or elsewhere, so they cannot come into the country. It does not help British sales and exports if the person to whom companies are trying to sell cannot get into the country in a reasonable time scale. That hits our exports and reduces our ability to sell around the world. Such issues come up time and again.

The Minister kindly came to Cambridge to meet a small selection of organisations, and I hope that he found it an interesting experience. I believe that his heart is absolutely in the right place. I am sure that he does not want our approach to cause harm to Britain, and that he would like nothing better than to get rid of the problem—the bureaucracy and other issues—but that problem absolutely must be tackled.

There are no doubt problems associated with illegal immigration, but that is a very different category. People have come here illegally, been brutally exploited by gangmasters and become stuck in a grey economy or trafficked, which is certainly not the right route. We want people to apply through the correct process, but we need to treat them correctly and make appropriate decisions, which we are not doing.

If we are to have a good debate about immigration, we need more accurate numbers, with correct information about who should be here and who actually is here. We simply do not yet have that information, or the competence required, which undermines the ability to make rational arguments or have confidence in the system. Until recently, we had no idea how many people who applied as students were here and had overstayed, let alone who they were.

We should target people who are not here legally, and not get it wrong. Some of the texts sent out by Capita, based on Home Office data, were targeted at people who are British citizens. There are a huge number of errors in those data, and there continue to be problems. The Vine report on e-borders—even the bits not redacted by the Home Secretary—have highlighted that about 650,000 alerts about potential drug and tobacco smugglers were accidentally deleted. That is not the standard of competence that we need from the Home Office.

The problem is not new. The previous Government had the problem of an asylum backlog, with some 500,000 cases discovered sitting there and awaiting a decision. Such bureaucratic incompetence is a problem for all Ministers, none of whom would want such things to be going on, but the problem is still there.

[Mark Field]

It is only fair to put it on the record that the redaction on the part of the Home Office should not necessarily be seen as sinister or as trying to pull the wool over British people’s eyes; some genuine security-related issues were obviously in the Home Secretary’s mind in that regard.

[Dr Huppert]

Indeed. I do not want to go into that issue in detail, but the Home Affairs Committee has asked the Home Secretary to let it see that document in private, but so far she has said that she will not do that. I hope that she is not suggesting that the Select Committee is a risk to national security; I am sure that she would not want to say that.

We must have exit checks back in place. We need to know who is leaving, so that we can tailor our resources more appropriately. When someone applies for a repeated visa, we have no idea whether they leave promptly every time, or whether they stay until just before they reapply. That absurd system means that we cannot tell the person who has been repeatedly breaking the rules from the person who has been repeatedly sticking to them. Exit checks were scrapped many years ago by the previous Government, and it is now a struggle to bring them back in. We must fight for their return, even though the Vine report was not encouraging on that.

The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster talked about students, from whom we benefit massively. Education is one of our biggest exports. Students who come here to study pay very large fees. They contribute to society while they are here, and many want to stay on and work here, and it is fantastic to keep the people whom we have just trained. Those who go back benefit us in many other ways. As the hon. Gentleman said, many world leaders and company leaders have trained here. We do fantastically well from a network of people who go on to act as British ambassadors. None the less, the messages that get sent out are problematic. The hon. Gentleman spoke about post-study work. We should make it far easier for people to come here and work and use the skills that we have given them. I hope the Government will move on that matter, because there are great benefits to be had.

We also have an issue around rhetoric, which is becoming increasingly unpleasant and inaccurate. A recent headline in The Telegraph said that there were 600,000 unemployed European Union migrants in Britain. The definition of unemployed in that instance was interesting, because it included schoolchildren, pensioners and a range of other people whom one would not normally think of as unemployed. They were not a problem, but that is the rhetoric that we see. The Government have touched on that matter. I am sure the Minister and I will disagree over the appropriateness of the “Go home” vans and of some of the other messages that are put out. Today, the Home Secretary has announced that the “Go home” vans will no longer be used. I am pleased about that because they were deeply inappropriate. We must not play into that unpleasant media rhetoric that criticises the benefits from immigration.

We must fix the decision-making process around individuals, because such errors are replicated. People get concerned when they hear stories of errors being made, and there are too many. Anybody who has a constituency case load will see bizarre decisions being made and things that do not make much sense. The Home Office tries to correct such decisions when they come up. I pay tribute to the regional account manager, Saleah Ahmed, who has helped me with a huge range of cases, but it should not be the role of MPs to spot that people have got things repeatedly wrong. Those decisions make a big difference and they get around the world. A perverse decision was made in a recent case: an Indian student who was required to have a certain amount of money in their bank account ended up being just £20 short of a large sum, due to currency fluctuations just before the decision. Any reasonable system would have spotted that the reason was a drop in the rupee by a few per cent., and would have concluded that the person deserved to pass the test, rather than failing them and causing huge problems.

We must do more work on those errors, which must be the bane of the Minister’s life. The number of successful appeals is quite alarming, as is the number of cases which the Home Office ends up not even defending because it accepts that it has got it wrong. The Home Affairs Committee has detailed many examples of such cases.

On the separate issue of asylum and refugees, which none of us wants to see conflated with general migration, the Select Committee recently published a detailed report on the asylum position. We found people waiting some 16 years for a decision on what should happen. I have constituents who are waiting. They contact the Border Agency every year asking for a decision and are told, “Not yet, we will let you know later.” That is totally unacceptable. We cannot put things in a box marked “complex cases” and then leave them there. These are people who have been stuck in this country for years. One constituent of mine has been waiting for 14 years. They are uncertain of their future and of what to do. We should never do that to people. People deserve a decision, and those decisions need to be correct and accurate. One problem with appeals is that the Government lose so many of them. I am sure that there are people who are trying to delay making a decision, but there are also those who have a genuine problem and a genuine case.

One of my constituents had been sentenced to death in Iran because he had converted to Christianity. He applied for asylum and included a copy of his death sentence and was told that that was not enough evidence that he was at risk. I would love to know what sort of proof most people have. That situation has now been corrected, and it did happen some five years ago.

We need better training and a system that is focused on ensuring that decisions are right. We have staff who appear to believe that their job is to try to stop people claiming asylum. That was highlighted by the independent inspector, who said that caseworkers were selective in the use of information to support the case for refusing asylum. Caseworkers should aim to make a decision that is correct rather than one not to let people in. There have been some horrible cases. In one case, the caseworker quoted

“independent country of origin information which stated that women in Iraq could gain effective help from a local police station, but omitted the preceding sentence which stated that ‘women have been sexually assaulted by the police when reporting to a police station.’”

That somewhat undermines the support one could expect from a police station, and makes it a far more reasonable action not to go there. We are trapping many of these people in a cycle of hopelessness, leaving them very vulnerable. I suggest Members look at that report and the British Red Cross report on destitution.

Let me summarise some of the good things that the Government have done. They have ended the routine use of child detention for immigration purposes. It was one of the great shames of the previous Government that thousands upon thousands of children were detained for immigration purposes; that should not happen. I am pleased that the Government have made the change. As has been debated in this place previously, however, more constraints have been put on family migration, making it hard for many of my constituents to be reunited with their families. Families are being torn apart, and I know the Government are looking more carefully at that.

There are also the oddities in our immigration system, which I have raised with the Minister before, and I thank him for his recent letter. For example, children born to unmarried British fathers before 2006 are not entitled to British citizenship due to a loophole in the way that the legislation was written under the previous Government. They would be so entitled if they were born after 2006. I am pleased that the Minister accepts that that should be changed. I hope that there will be some legislative vehicle to do that. Will he comment also on the related question of what happens to people in that category who are raised in the UK and who are effectively stateless? Other countries believe them to be British—they have a British father and they are in the UK—but we do not allow them British citizenship.

Another matter raised with me was the effect of border controls on families whose children have a different surname from the parent with whom they are travelling. Quite rightly, when that happens, the border force asks why such children are being taken out of the country; that is absolutely appropriate. However, it is incredibly frustrating for a parent who travels constantly, because they must carry with them seven legal documents, including a birth certificate and a marriage certificate. That seems inappropriate. A suggestion has been made to the Passport Office that parents’ names should be listed in a child’s passport. That would simplify the situation and enable us to stop cases where children are being abducted, and not stop families who are trying to travel properly. I hope the Minister will consider that matter.

We must have immigration controls, but we also need exit checks to be introduced competently so that we know who is here and who is not, which will result in better data. That will allow us to have a properly informed debate rather than the anti-foreign rhetoric that is heard far too often from both the media and political parties on the left and right. I want the Minister to ensure that we have a system that works and that makes the correct decisions so that the right people who will benefit Britain can come in quickly and easily and that the people who are not allowed here also get fair, reasonable and accurate rejections. I hope the Minister gets a reputation for making our decision-making process entirely competent and not politically sexy.

Immigration Bill

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The labour market is an important issue, and it is particularly important to ensure that employers are not exploiting low-skilled migration. I will come to that issue in a moment, but let me finish the point about illegal immigration.

Instead of gimmicks, we need practical measures to help tackle illegal immigration. Why not improve enforcement? Why not reinstate fingerprinting for stowaways at Calais, as we have been urging the Home Secretary to do for two and a half years? Why not tighten up checks in the first place? Student visitor visas have now become too easy a route through which people come to Britain to work illegally. They do not even have to provide proper paperwork to show they have a place on a course. Numbers are up 70% since the election. Surely that should ring alarm bells for Ministers. The Labour party will table amendments to have proper checks on student visitor visas, stronger inspections and enforcement, and stronger action against employers who take on and exploit illegal migrants. If the Home Secretary is serious about tackling illegal immigration, I hope she will back our amendments and plans.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but we must make some progress so that other Members can contribute.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Lady mentioned student visitor visas. Is she aware how essential those are for many colleges and English language schools, and a whole ranges of other institutions around the country? Does she really want to damage their business?

[Yvette Cooper]

It is right to have a proper system that is fair and supports our economy, universities and higher education sector, but also prevents abuse. It is a concern that the hon. Gentleman’s Government are dissuading and discouraging university students who want to come here from all over the world, but he should also be worried about the potential for abuse of student visitor visas, as highlighted by the independent inspectorate. Concerns were raised, but because those visas are not included in the Government’s net migration target, the fact that numbers have increased by 70% does not bother Ministers, even though the inspectorate raised the risk of abuse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Poole (Mr Syms), who has struck the right tone for debating immigration policy. I am glad that Labour Front Benchers will support the Government while tabling vigorous and robust amendments in Committee. That is how the House should discuss immigration policy. I am very much against the arms race that seems to have developed in the past few years, in which political parties compete with one another to show that they are tougher on foreigners. If the House of Commons can demonstrate in the debate and the vote the belief that we need to tackle illegal migration but that we need a fair and just system, we will send out a powerful message.

I first served on a Bill Committee 26 years ago, with my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). We have made journeys to the Front Bench, but have ended up on the Back Benches again—she more recently than I. We have therefore heard some of this discussion before, because with every immigration Bill Governments always say that they want to be tough but fair. We still end up with an immigration Bill before us every two years. Although Governments are willing to do something about immigration, especially illegal immigration, that is not borne out by what actually happens.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the number of immigration Bills. Does he share my concern about the lack of pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill—or indeed of previous ones—and does he think that the Home Affairs Committee could have done that well? Would it not be good if some of our previous recommendations had been included?

[Keith Vaz]

As a member of the Committee—there are four Committee members in their places this afternoon—I am not going to offer to take on more work, given our work load. As the hon. Gentleman knows, every quarter we look at the work of the Home Office on immigration, and I am certain that some aspects of the Bill will be included in the work that we do. We will therefore scrutinise some aspects of the Bill but not its entirety.

In pursuing an immigration policy that is fair and just, we need to be very careful with our enforcement methods. We also need to welcome decisions taken by the Government when they move in the right direction. The Home Secretary was right to shelve the ad vans, and I congratulate her on doing so. As the shadow Home Secretary and others have said, those vans caused enormous concern in the communities. We do not have a figure for how many people got into the vans and asked for a lift back to the airport, but the vans cost £10,000 and were out for six days in inner-city London. As yet, we do not know how many people have gone back. When the pilot is over, we will need those figures. Meanwhile, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) for his superb Adjournment debate. It gives us all heart to know that we can call for an Adjournment debate to advocate the abolition of an aspect of Government policy and for it to happen two weeks later. It gives us comfort to know that we have some powers as Back Benchers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for reminding me to talk about Scotland. There are proposals that relate to devolved services that we are in control of. We do not like them—we do not like them at all. We are in charge of the health service in Scotland. We would need to be convinced that these measures were in the best interests of Scotland before we would go through with them. Scotland is a different country. The hon. Lady knows that, and I think she would agree that we would not do these things.

[Dr Huppert]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his debate last week. I agree with him on that issue. I also share his concerns about landlords. Is he as pleased as I am that there will be only one pilot in one location and that the policy will not be rolled out without a vote? Does he take some comfort from that, even though he might not be totally reassured?

[Pete Wishart]

I take a little comfort from that, but not a great deal. I do not know what the hon. Gentleman is thinking, but I am sure that he will not vote for this nonsense tonight. I know what he has said. I can see all the Liberals sitting there thinking, “Uh-uh! This is not a liberal Bill.” It is one of the most illiberal Bills that we have seen from this Government. It will be an absolute disgrace if even one Liberal goes through the Aye Lobby tonight. When I sat on the Opposition Benches with them, I heard them rant against new Labour immigration Bills. This Bill is 10 times worse than anything new Labour concocted.

Scotland has had the “go home” project. The UK Border Agency office in Glasgow was telling people to go home before they had even sat down. Now that we have got rid of the appalling hate vans, I want the Minister to guarantee that we will not have “go home” messages at UKBA offices. We do not want that in Scotland. We do not have UKIP in Scotland. Nigel Farage had to get a police escort out of Edinburgh. We hate UKIP to the bottom of our ballot boxes. It has not secured one deposit in Scotland. We do not want to take part in the appalling race to the bottom that the Conservatives are engaged in with UKIP—a race to the bottom that they can never win. They will never out-UKIP UKIP. It is the master of right-wing gimmickry. If the Conservatives enter a race with UKIP, they will only get beaten. I think that the Minister knows that.

This matter is important for Scotland. The hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Pamela Nash) is right about that. We have our own demographic issues and population requirements. I will tell Members the difference between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. When the Scottish Government received the latest population figures, they put out a press release welcoming the rise in the Scottish population. Could you ever, Madam Deputy Speaker, imagine a UK Government welcoming a rise in population? That is what distinguishes us as a Government from them—we welcome the contribution of immigration. We have our own population requirements, but we are stuck and burdened with a set of immigration policies that are almost the exact opposite of what we require. That is why we must wrest control of our own immigration requirements.

Our population has gone up and that is good, but there are concerns that it might still fall. Even 10 years ago, we were worried that our population might fall below the 5 million mark. Thankfully, that did not happen. The health provisions will cut across our responsibility for devolved services, and we will have to look at them carefully before we do anything.

There is one thing I want to say about immigration, because we do not like any of this stuff—it is just rubbish. The UK Government’s immigration policy is having an impact on Scotland’s great universities. We have three universities in the top 200 universities in the world. We have fantastic world-class universities and this Government are hurting them. Just stop it. We want to ensure that we get the best possible students to our universities. All this rubbish that the Government are proposing puts more and more people off. We have to compete with other English-speaking nations around the world to ensure that our universities stay world class. We just wish the UK Government would get out.

This issue is simple. Let us admit that Government Members seem to be going in one direction—the emerging UKIP UK has its own set of values, culture and political direction—and in Scotland we are going another way. We do not like this stuff. We do not vote Conservative and we hate UKIP, so we are not going to go in that direction. Here is a novel solution: why do they not do their own thing and we do our own thing? It is called independence and it works for most countries. Next year, thank goodness, we will achieve it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate and to welcome the Bill.

Immigration remains among the issues that most concern my constituents; that was the case in the run-up to the last general election, and it is still the issue most raised on the doorstep. Not totally surprisingly, perhaps, my constituency does not experience huge immigration—according to the last statistics I saw, I had two of the five most ethnically English towns in the country—but there remains a fear of immigration. What people see, perhaps in neighbouring towns, causes them concern, perhaps over and above the real extent of the problem. Nevertheless, they are concerned—and they express their concerns regularly—that too many people are coming here illegally and not being sent back home. They are especially worried that serious criminals who complete their prison sentences are not being deported, and they are worried that our public services and housing cannot cope with the population increase.

It is right that the Government address those issues and try to restore confidence in the system; we all want an immigration system that people can have faith in. We want to get this right so that “asylum” can cease to be a dirty word and we can be proud to take people who are in desperate need. I am not sure that most of my constituents think that way now. Rather, they are concerned that the system is being abused and that everyone who arrives here has no reason to be here.

While welcoming most of the Bill, I want to focus on some of its key areas. From my relatively limited immigration casework, I know that this can be a byzantine system that sometimes produces bizarre results. Reading some of the verdicts, I find it hard to work out what the facts of the case are or how the verdict bears much relation to those facts.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the byzantine complexity and the errors in decision making. Does he agree that the Government’s priority should be to ensure that decisions are made correctly?

[Nigel Mills]

That should be a priority for every Department. I serve on the Work and Pensions Committee. Sadly, the DWP’s administration processes too often come up with the wrong decisions, but the problem is often fixed by a mandatory reconsideration process within the Department.

It would be interesting to hear from the Minister how the review process would work. I think it is the right idea, however, because we do not want to be troubling the courts and tribunals with mistakes in the system. If they can be corrected within the Department, that must be a more cost-effective, fairer and quicker system for all involved. We need to know that the person doing the reconsideration is independent, and not just defaulting to the previous decision—because he knows the guy who took it and so it must have been right. We all want a system that gives clear, quick, fair and accurate decisions first time around, avoiding a labyrinthine process that subjects people to an awful wait while trying to establish their status, which makes them miserable and gets them stuck in the system for longer than necessary.

That is a genuine concern for my constituents: why is the system still so slow? Let us get it right first time. If the person has no right to be here, let them be told that so that we do not have to go through multiple different appeals down different routes. The proposal that those with no right to be here no longer need a separate removal notice has to be right.

I also agree about article 8. We need to get the balance right between the interests of the public in this country and the interests of the person making the claim. I am not sure our courts have been interpreting that correctly. We have a right to be protected from serious criminals. I speak as someone who generally favours deregulation and does not favour imposing new burdens on people, so it is with some caution that I welcome the proposals to ask landlords to start checking the immigration status of their prospective tenants. I have an interest, as I rent out a house in Nottingham where I used to live. I use an agent, so I am pretty certain I will be safe from these rules as long as the agent is competent.

There is a real public interest in trying to make sure that it is harder for illegal immigrants to avoid the system and stay here without a right to do so. One of the ways we can do that is to ask landlords to make sure that the person they are renting out to has a right to be here. In my constituency, most letting agents go through some hugely extensive and complicated processes, and take a lot of money off tenants, to check their credit history, references from previous landlords and all manner of things. I am not sure that it is that much of an extra burden to ask them to check a person’s status as well. Clearly there are some whose position is so complicated that it will not be easy for a landlord or agent to come to a clear understanding. That is why we need a service from the Home Office that gives a clear and quick answer and says, “Yes, you can rent to this person. No, you can’t rent to that person.”

Having worked with clearance mechanisms in my previous life, I know that getting that to be quick and accurate will not be straightforward, but it has to be the right thing to do. We need a system that is clear enough so that not every landlord seeks a clearance every time to be 100 per cent. safe. We need a clearance system that works and is used only where there is some doubt and not where there is clearly an easy situation to determine.

Most of us would think that it is ridiculous that someone who has no right to be here can get a UK driving licence or a UK bank account. That should never have been the case and it is right to stop that so that someone cannot build up a life here that they are not entitled to have, because that can make it harder for us to deport them.

I have no need to detain the House at great length. I welcome the Bill, which represents a real step forward. I am sure my constituents will welcome it, although there are things that sadly we cannot do which they would have liked to see in it. There is a great deal of concern about what will happen next year when restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria are lifted. We need to understand what can be done to make sure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. But this is a welcome Bill, and I look forward to it having a speedy passage through Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield]

I am well aware of those figures. In general, the defence has been that the numbers were flatlining and that there has been a slight increase this year. There has, however, been a disturbing fall in numbers in certain areas, including taught postgraduate courses, and that is a problem. The point is not that there might be a slight increase; it is that we are losing market share. Higher education is a hugely growing sector of the international economy. The Government, through the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, have estimated that the number of international students travelling around the world will have doubled by 2020. It is not good enough to be complacent about flatlining figures or about small increases, because they mean that we are losing market share.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman and I have discussed students’ concerns many times. Does he agree that a similar argument applies to the student visitor visa? Will he join me in opposing any proposal to clamp down on those arrangements, on the ground that it would also damage our colleges?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. May I point out to the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) that quite a lot of Members are waiting to get in, including Dr Huppert? Perhaps if he takes fewer interventions, we might get to the hon. Gentleman.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

I will try to fit my comments into the time available.

This country benefits substantially from immigration. We benefit economically and culturally. We are net improved by immigration, which has taken place for many hundreds of years. Are there, however, problems with illegal immigration? Yes, absolutely, and we should deal with many of them, including people who are being trafficked and held in quasi-slavery conditions.

I want an immigration system that knows what is happening in this country and knows who has come in and who has left. We need to bring back exit checks so that we know who is in and who is out. We need a system where decisions are made quickly and correctly, rather than one with the current problems. That is what I think the Minister ought to focus on, and we debated it this morning in Westminster Hall.

The Bill deals with a different set of issues. It is a shame that there was no pre-legislative scrutiny, because we could have fleshed out a lot of the details and come to understand the proposals. It is clear from today’s debate that not everybody, and I include myself, understands the details of much that is being proposed. There is still a lot to understand and that is a problem. We need the system to work properly, but that must not be at the expense of a system that is fair.

The Bill definitely has some good bits. For example, our dealing with dodgy immigration advisers will be welcomed by anybody who has repeatedly to deal with constituents affected by the issue. I am, however, concerned about certain other things. Effectively abolishing application for immigration bail is of particular concern, especially when the Home Office does not seem to have any evidence that it is a specific problem that needs to be addressed.

I continue to be very concerned, like other hon. Members, about the end of appeals. That could be dangerous when we are not making the right decisions. When we are getting the decisions right, we can look at how we can stop people prolonging the process, but when so many appeals are successful, it shows that there are problems. If we remove people before they have made their appeal, how can we be sure that we will hear the appeal properly? If somebody has been wronged, will there be a chance for them to present their case within a reasonable period of time? We have also heard about the needs of children in the UK who have been separated from their parents through deportation.

I do not think that the landlord proposal is a good idea. Indeed, I think that it is a profoundly bad idea. I am pleased that rather than it being implemented everywhere, there will be only one pilot in one location to test it. I am confident that it will fail the test, as did the vans, which I am pleased have been abandoned. If it proves not to be a good idea, we will be able to vote to ensure that it does not go ahead anywhere else. I am very pleased about that.

I am concerned about how workable the landlord proposal will be. I am concerned that it will take 48 hours for the Home Office to verify somebody’s status. I wish that it was always that fast when I ask it something. In many areas, that will be too long and landlords will not take the risk of renting to somebody who cannot prove their status on the spot. If we are to implement the proposal, the Home Office has to find an easy and clear way for people to show that they have the correct status. That must also apply to British citizens who do not have a passport. Otherwise, we will drive people into the hands of exploitative rogue landlords. This matter must be subject to the affirmative procedure so that we can be absolutely sure that we will get a vote.

On the health care proposals, visitors who are here to stay with their family or on business are already expected to pay for their health care if they go into hospital, however much it may cost. However, as we have heard, they do not always do so. The concept that paying £200 will get people free access to health care is something that one can imagine marketing overseas: “Come to Britain and get free health care for £200”. The US would never offer a deal like that.

There are many questions to which we need answers. What will that £200 cover? Will people get complete cover for that amount? Will people who stay here for year after year and who work here, pay their taxes and pay their national insurance have to pay £200 a year on top of everything that they already pay? I am pleased that there is a slight discount for students, but currently they do not pay anything towards their health care. I hope that the Minister will look carefully at that issue and, at the very least, offer a larger reduction.

Various comments have been made by Members on both sides of the Chamber about the benefits that we receive from our higher education and further education sectors. English language schools are a big employer in my area and in many others. I am pleased that the Government have clamped down on bogus colleges. None of us wants to make it easy for people who are actively cheating the system to get away with it. However, further restrictions will be even more damaging and will send a message to the rest of the world that we are closed for business.

I was therefore horrified earlier today when the shadow Home Secretary called for stronger checks on short-term student visitor visas, with no serious evidence that they are a massive problem. I contacted one of the English language schools in my constituency, Studio Cambridge. Its managing director, Malcolm Mottram, said in response to the shadow Home Secretary’s comments that

“any further visa restrictions will be seen as Britain closing its doors—even to the brightest and the best—even more tightly.”

I urge the Opposition not to progress that policy any further because I do not want my constituents to be damaged in that way. People are already being driven overseas to Ireland, the US, Australia and South Africa. Please do not make it any worse.

There are areas where I think the Bill should go further. I would like to see a system that ensures that we get decisions right the first time. That is the key that would unlock this whole problem. However, that is probably not something that can be written into a clause and slid into the Bill.

I would like a commitment to end the routine detention of children for immigration purposes to be written into the Bill. It is a disgrace that the last Government held thousands of young people. We have stopped that and we should ensure that that legacy continues by writing it into the law so that it never happens again.

I hope that the Minister will consider two other matters. First, people whose children do not share their surname often have to produce a huge amount of paperwork, including birth and marriage certificates, when they come into the country to show that they are allowed to travel with their child. That is a huge burden and I hope that the Minister will consider the options. Legislation may be required so that children’s passports are updated to include the names of the people with whom they may travel. That would make a big difference to a particular set of people and would allow immigration officers to focus on the real problems.

Lastly, as the Minister and I have discussed on a number of occasions, we could finally close a number of loopholes left in the law by the previous Government. In particular, some children born to unmarried British fathers before 2006 are deprived of citizenship. They would be allowed citizenship if their fathers had been married or if they had been born after 2006, so this is a clear anomaly and I think the Minister accepts that. His predecessor certainly did, and the Bill could be used as a vehicle to correct it. It seems that the Bill will receive a Second Reading, so I look forward to its being examined in Committee and substantially improved.

Alcohol Strategy Consultation

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Browne]

The consultation was held across England and Wales. We received about 1,500 responses and, as I said, the majority of people disagreed with a 45p minimum unit price, while about 75% of people—three quarters—expressed concern that the policy would affect people other than harmful or hazardous drinkers. Such a concern has been expressed universally.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the fact that 56% of respondents disagreed with a minimum unit price of 45p, but does he know how many thought it should be zero and how many thought it should be higher, for example 50p? What extra concrete evidence do the Government want before a decision can be made on this policy?

2014 JHA Opt-out Decision

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend may find it rather strange that we have to opt out and then try to opt back in, but that is precisely because of the system that was negotiated by the previous Labour Government. It is not possible for us to opt out of every measure apart from, for example, the European arrest warrant; as I will explain, we have to opt out of everything and then choose to opt into some measures.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The Home Secretary is being extremely generous in giving way. Those of us who are keen to see some of the opt-ins are very concerned about the time gap between the opt-out and the opt-in. Will she assure us that it will be as brief as possible, particularly so that, for example, Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, does not accidentally lose his job because we are out for a few minutes?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Today’s debate should be about the very future of the United Kingdom’s democracy. I and many of my right hon. and hon. Friends believe that one of the great duties of a state is to settle on a fair and strong criminal law and to ensure that the crime-fighting resources are put in to maintain that law. We also believe that, in an increasingly global world of criminal activity, those functions can be properly discharged by the Home Secretary in Cabinet and by the police forces of our country only if we have proper co-operation and collaboration arrangements with other countries abroad. We need those co-operation arrangements, not just with other European countries in the European Union or the few countries in Europe not in the European Union, but with every country around the world. I am pleased to say that thanks to successive Governments and Home Secretaries we do have in place a set of pretty good arrangements with the major countries, and we have demonstrated our ability to negotiate successful arrangements for extradition and mutual crime fighting with those countries that are not in the European Union and to find ways of doing that with countries in the European Union.

Let me make it clear at the outset that those of us who do not wish to opt back in to European criminal justice measures are no more soft on crime than anyone else in the House. We believe that there can be an alternative way of ensuring proper co-operation and collaboration with France, Germany and the other leading European Union countries, just as we have those successful co-operation arrangements with countries that are outside the European Union.

Our objection to any of these measures, including the European arrest warrant, is not necessarily about the measure itself, and certainly not its purpose, but about the way in which the institutional structure is developed to back up the measure. We are trying to protect our democracy, this Parliament and future Home Secretaries from the event that the European Court of Justice, once we have opted into any of these measures, can use that opt-in as a device for making good criminal law in Brussels and in the Court that this House and the British people might fundamentally disagree with.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about alternatives to some of these measures. Is he aware of the formal evidence given by the police, who said that alternatives to the European arrest warrant

“would result in fewer extraditions, longer delays, higher costs, more offenders evading justice and increased risk to public safety”?

Does he accept that that is the police’s advice?

[Mr Redwood]

Of course we can find police and others who take the hon. Gentleman’s view, but I think that it is putting very different weights in the balance. He is giving us an immediate topical problem of view, and I am giving him something fundamental about a national democratic state and the future good government of our country. When I weigh those in the balance, there is no issue for me; of course we must protect our national democracy and then work away at any imperfections there might be in the cross-border arrangements because we have put democracy first.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

I will put that view to members of the Home Affairs Committee when we meet tomorrow. I will quote the hon. Gentleman and give them his e-mail address so that they can communicate with him directly.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Keith Vaz]

And here is one of them.

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for giving way. Just to show that we are indeed doing the work, perhaps he could put that point to us on Wednesday, as we are also meeting then. We are meeting twice a week at the moment, and we can continue to do so.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is one of the most assiduous attenders of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and yes, we are meeting twice this week. Tomorrow, we are taking evidence from the Home Secretary. The perfect time for us to begin our inquiry would have been the point at which she gave evidence to the Committee, but before having this vote. I can give her notice that we will be asking her about these matters tomorrow, although I am sure that she knows that already, bearing in mind the composition of the Committee. That is the approach we should have taken. There is no need for this mad rush or for instant decisions. Why do we need to rush this through the House and get it all over with before the summer recess? I see no reason to do that, given that we have until 1 December 2014 to vote on the matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Reckless]

I am not sure whether my hon. Friend has noticed some consternation among Liberal Democrat Members who think it is always and everywhere in the national interest to opt into anything that the European Union is doing.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Mr Cash]

Indeed, and if the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), who is obviously extremely keen to intervene, wishes to do so, I would be happy to take it.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who serves on the Home Affairs Committee with me, is heavily wrong in this case, but that is not what I wished to say. Does the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) believe that one cannot hold a position on something until it has been through a Select Committee? Select Committees do wonderful work but there are other ways to find things out. Not every single decision of this House goes through a Select Committee—that might be a bit slow.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate, and to congratulate the Home Secretary. I welcomed the announcement that she made last Tuesday, which has given us a chance to work out how to get the details right. I see today as the first step in that process, to be followed by scrutiny by the Select Committees. I look forward particularly to working with the Home Affairs Committee. I think that it will be possible for us to be both pragmatic and well-informed, and to get everything done in time.

Although, as I have said, I supported the Home Secretary’s statement, I did not observe complete support from her own side, although I am pleased to say that a few Members have supported her very sensible position.

[Mark Reckless]

There may have been less than full support for the statement from Conservative Members because, at the time, we thought that we were dealing with a Command Paper and a decision to opt back into the European arrest warrant. Now that we have heard from the Secretary of State for Justice that that is no longer the case, many of us are rather happier.

[Dr Huppert]

I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is happy, although on occasion he may not be entirely accurate.

We have discussed a number of measures that the Liberal Democrats, for example, would not opt into, and I shall say more about some of them later. However, I still believe that the European arrest warrant is absolutely right, and I was pleased to hear the Home Secretary extol its virtues. I hope that she will continue to do so, and that the Select Committee will continue to support a reformed arrest warrant.

What we just heard from the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), and what we heard earlier from the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) and the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash), illustrated the tendency of some Members to do exactly what we were urged not to do by the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David): the tendency to be so obsessed with Europe that crime, justice and all the other issues that we ought to care about—and about which our constituents actually care—fall by the wayside.

[Mr Cash]

I agree that this is not about Europe. It is about Britain; it is about the British citizens. I invite the hon. Gentleman to consider a case in Staffordshire. A constituent of one of my neighbouring Members of Parliament was convicted in Italy of murder and was sentenced to 15 years in absentia, but was not even in Italy when the murder was committed.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is certainly making a point, but I am not sure that it is entirely the point. Justice systems all around the world make errors. The British justice system has convicted people, only for those convictions to be overturned on appeal. I do not claim that justice is perfect, but I do claim that an obsession with European issues weakens our focus on policing and crime, which are what we should be focusing on. I do not know the circumstances of the case the hon. Gentleman mentions, and it is entirely possible errors were made, but that does not mean we should not work with Europe or continue with the justice and home affairs co-operation we currently have.

[Chris Bryant]

I just wish to point out to the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) that when Russia tried to extradite a man from the UK for supposedly murdering a Russian Orthodox priest, the said Russian Orthodox priest gave evidence in the case in London, thereby proving he had not been murdered.

[Dr Huppert]

I would be delighted to pass that on, and I am sure the two hon. Gentlemen could have a separate conversation about the matter. There are a wealth of individual cases, some of which I looked at when I was on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, but the obsession with Europe that runs through the Conservative party—or, to rephrase that, through many elements of the Conservative party—is deeply alarming. I am pleased we have managed to get sensible comments from Conservative Ministers on the Front Bench about our need to work with Europe. As crime becomes more international and people can travel more, it is important that we are able to share information.

If we were to ask the public whether they want criminals brought back here to face justice, I do not think many of them—other than the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash)—would immediately start talking about the powers of the ECJ. I simply do not believe that is the main issue.

We are not where we should be yet, however. We have this very odd, very convoluted, very complex process, and many of us think it would be much simpler if it had not been negotiated in the form that it was, with the very complex opt-out followed by an opt-in process. I do not think any Member would say that was the best way to proceed. It may or may not have been the best that could be achieved—I do not know the details—but it is certainly very complex, and I and my colleagues will be very happy to work with the Home Secretary and to keep the pressure on her to make sure the negotiations to opt back in are successful. That will be a complex and difficult task, however.

That is why it is also very important to make sure that nothing goes wrong. We do not want to end up accidentally not being able to get back into things we need to be in; for example, we do not want to end up having to be out of Europol for a brief period, which would mean that Europol director, Rob Wainwright—a Brit—could not continue in his role.

The Lords European Union Committee has conducted detailed scrutiny of this and has produced a detailed report. In April it concluded that it was not convinced a compelling case had been made to opt out. I have to say I agree with it. I think it would be far easier, far cleaner and far simpler not to exercise the opt-out at all. I would love to know how much is being spent in time, in effort and in getting a huge number of civil servants and lawyers to go through the details of all of this, and what the overall benefits would be.

It is absolutely true that, as many Members have said, some of the items under discussion are outdated or irrelevant, and that they simply do not matter. We should weigh that against the massive cost and the time that would be taken in this House and elsewhere in going through them all and making a decision.

[George Eustice]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point on board, but is he aware that even the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank far closer to his views on these issues than mine, has said that our continued involvement with these JHA powers should be conditional on a fundamental reform of the European arrest warrant?

[Dr Huppert]

I agree that the European arrest warrant needs to be reformed. I have said so in many debates in this place. When I was on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we produced a list of some of the reforms there should be. The European arrest warrant should be fixed and reformed. That is a different question, however, from the one about whether we should exercise this opt-out and go through the complex, tortuous process of opting back in again. I would prefer not to do that. I would prefer to stay as we are. I do not see any measure that actively causes us harm which we plan to get out of, but I accept that that decision has been taken, that the Home Secretary and the Conservatives are keen to exercise that opt-out, and that many of the things we will end up leaving are not very significant measures. I completely accept that and am committed to making sure that we keep the ones that are most essential for the continued protection of British citizens. That is my focus.

[Mark Reckless]

What about the provision on the exchange of DNA? This country has a vast database, relative to the rather limited ones in most EU countries. Is that not one issue, at least, where the hon. Gentleman’s commitment to civil liberties outshines his Europhilia?

[Dr Huppert]

That is indeed an issue I have more concern about. As I have said to the hon. Gentleman twice now, I do not think we should do everything that Europe wants; one example is on the rather ridiculous idea about olive oil not being able to be stored properly. That was a quickly shot down, silly story; it was certainly nothing that any of us would want to see. I hope that he will share some Europhilia with us at some point in future debates. I am pleased that this Government are reducing the amount of DNA that is kept—we had a hard fight on that.

I am pleased that in the set of things published in that Command Paper, which I hope will be the basis of the set—I would perhaps like to see even more in it—are the key measures that Liberal Democrats negotiated. In a previous Opposition day debate on this, I set out some red lines that I would want to see. I am pleased that every one of them has been met by these new approaches and that the preliminary decision includes all the list of the key EU crime-fighting measures recommended to us by the Association of Chief Police Officers. Before the hon. Gentleman rises, may I say that he knows we share a belief that ACPO, as a private limited company, is not the arbiter of what should and should not be done? We will debate that later, but it is useful to hear expert advice from the police, in whatever form they happen to put it.

We have seen many cases showing how important the European arrest warrant is. Mark Lilley, one of Britain’s most wanted men, was captured on 8 July at his villa in Spain, and he is the 51st fugitive to have been arrested of the 65 identified under Operation Captura, an initiative launched by the Serious Organised Crime Agency in 2006 to work with Spanish law enforcement to capture UK suspects thought to be hiding in Spain. That was not, and could not be, done before. Roger Critchell, director of operations at Crimestoppers, said:

“We are extremely relieved that this dangerous drug-dealer has been arrested and will be made to face justice.”

Why would anybody want to make it harder to bring somebody like that back to face justice?

The EAW also means that criminals hiding out in this country do not stay here. It will be easier to get foreign criminals off our streets and back to their states for the crimes that they have committed there. Since 2009, 4,005 criminal suspects have been deported from the UK to other EU countries, and it was good to hear the Home Secretary refer to that. Fifty-seven deportations were for child sex offences, 414 for drug trafficking, 86 for rape and 105 for murder. Does any right hon. or hon. Member really think we should be making it harder for these people to face the justice they deserve?

[Mr Andrew Turner]

I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying, but can he not think of a country—Iceland is a good example—that is not part of the EU but that could be helped by having this arrangement extended to it?

[Dr Huppert]

If the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that the EAW could spread out to more and more countries, there is something to be said for that. I am not sure that that is entirely the argument he would wish to be making. There are very many countries with which we simply have no extradition relationships; we do not have a treaty, and we have no mechanism for sending people back to them or for getting people back whom we would like to see. That is unacceptable, and we should certainly be focusing on reducing that gap, rather than creating an entirely new one.

We do need a reformed EAW. That has been discussed and I think it is agreed by everybody here. It is not right that Poland summons so many people. I understand that that happens because in Polish law the police do not have the jurisdiction and the freedom to decide that something is too trivial to proceed with, and we should look at safeguards in that regard.

I am also pleased that, as an improvement to the EAW, the Home Secretary has agreed that Britain will sign up to the European supervision order. That will mean that when British citizens are arrested overseas they can be bailed and allowed to await trial at home. Andrew Symeou spent 10 months in pre-trial detention and a further nine months on bail in Greece, only then to be acquitted. That could all have been avoided if he had been able to spend that time on bail back in the UK. Similarly, EU nationals who come to the UK and commit crimes can be bailed back to their home countries, which will free up space in our prisons, as well as being better for those people themselves.

It is right that we work with our European partners. The UK is a leader in the field of crime and policing, and we should also be leading in Europe, not trying to run away from it. The UK Government made security and stability key priorities for their presidency of the EU in 2005, pushing ahead with EU action on counter-terrorism, people trafficking, migration and enhancing EU-wide police co-operation—things this House should support. With cross-border crime becoming ever more sophisticated, when we help Europe, we very much help ourselves. The director of Europol, Rob Wainwright, will continue to do the excellent work he is doing, co-ordinating cross-border investigations and leading teams that pull together the resources and information of multiple member states. The importance of Europol cannot be understated. It has been instrumental in the case of Madeleine McCann and many others, and to lose that expertise would be tragic.

[Steve McCabe]

The hon. Gentleman made reference to Rob Wainwright and not wanting him to have to stand down. During the period when we are not part of Europol, is it reasonable for a police officer from another country to head it up?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. I hope that the intervening period would be one of these nominal, legal fictions—a minute or something —and during that time we could just not notice the problem he describes. If the time period were long, we would have exactly that problem.

Europol has been instrumental. It has had a huge number of cases, more than 1,300 in the UK, which have included dealing with the world’s largest online paedophile network in Operation Rescue, which led to 184 arrests and 230 sexually exploited children being protected. That is yet another good thing we should want to support. Eurojust will help us work together, allowing cross-border cases to be focused much more effectively. A joint investigating team was set up following the murder of three members of the al-Hilli family and cyclist Sylvain Mollier in 2012 in France, allowing the French gendarmes and the Surrey police officers to work together, to deal with confusions over national laws and processes, and to maximise their capacity. This list goes on and on; we benefit from these key measures.

I am very pleased with this list of 35 measures. It is the right way to go, and I think we can scrutinise them. We should consider some of the ones that did not quite make the cut and decide whether they would benefit us or are things we could live without. I congratulate the Home Secretary on standing firm before her own party, I look forward to the scrutiny that we will all carry out, and I commend the motion to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

It always pains me to disagree with a man whom I love so much, but as the hon. Gentleman refused to return my phone calls at the end of last week, I must disagree with him on this one occasion. I think that there are genuine risks. This is what was said by the House of Lords Committee to which the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) referred:

“On the basis of the evidence we have received we do not consider that the Government have made a convincing case for exercising the opt-out…Opting out of the police and criminal justice measures would have significant adverse negative repercussions for the internal security of the United Kingdom and the administration of criminal justice in the United Kingdom.”

That is a high hurdle for us to overcome if we are to move forward.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I see the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) moving forward, but I will not take any more interventions, because we need to hear from the opting-in Justice Secretary.

There are many other risks in relation to the timetable. We do not know which commissioners will be responsible for the respective portfolios by the end of next year, we do not know who the President of the Commission will be, and we do not know what the majority pattern in the Commission will be. The European parliamentary elections will take place on 22 May. There will be a completely different system for the appointment of commissioners next year, and by 1 December we may well have a different Commission which will take a completely different view from the present one. Moreover, during today’s debate the Government themselves have admitted—and this has come steadily more to light—that there may well be an interim period between opting out and opting in, and I think that that poses a danger to all of us.

The Home Secretary tried to suggest that this represents the grand emancipation of Britain from the thralls of the European Union. I disagree with her. The end result will be, at best, our opting out from some 67 measures that already do not apply to the United Kingdom, have been superseded, or are completely redundant and irrelevant, and from another 30 measures in regard to which it is almost impossible to see how the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice could possibly have any effect on the European Union.

It is a delight to see the Justice Secretary. Let me end my speech with a little rejoicing. As all Members will know, there is more joy in heaven when one sinner repenteth…and that is certainly true in relation to the right hon. Gentleman. I welcome what he is about to say, because he said in 2009:

“Our instinct will always be against handing more sovereignty to Brussels unless there is a compelling reason to do so. That includes the arrest warrant.”

I am delighted to say that he has completely changed his view. The Command Paper points out that 5,184 people were arrested between April 2009 and April 2013, and that very few of them were British. I only hope that the Justice Secretary, in the process of renouncing his previous views, decides to welcome what was announced in the House of Lords this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

What I can say to my hon. Friend is that, as he and the other Select Committee Chairmen would expect, we will look very carefully at the conclusions they draw and we will bring these matters back to the House for a further vote. He would expect nothing less than that.

There are measures, such as the prisoner transfer agreement, that are very much in the interests of this country. I personally want to see Hungarian prisoners back in Hungarian jails as quickly as possible, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) rightly said, we should have mechanisms to ensure our police forces can work together and share information when they need to.

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the Justice Secretary for that comment. Will he make it clear that he believes it is in the national interest to rejoin a reformed European arrest warrant, Europol, Eurojust and the other areas mentioned in this Command Paper?

[Chris Grayling]

I was coming to that point. I know just how controversial the European arrest warrant has been. My hon. Friends in the Conservative party know full well that it has been a matter of great concern to me; the shadow spokesman just quoted what I said in 2009, so it has clearly been a matter of great concern. What I say to the House and my hon. Friends who share that concern is that I would not personally have signed up to this package without the sensible reforms the Home Secretary is proposing. With those reforms being put into legislation, I can say to those colleagues who shared my misgivings that I believe we can trust what the Home Secretary is doing, that I believe we can go along with this agreement, that we are replicating the situation in other member states, and that I believe this is a robust approach.

I am also very sensitive to the points the hon. Member for Belfast East (Naomi Long) made about Irish issues, and we have taken them carefully into account. I have been to Belfast and discussed this with the Justice Minister there.

Proposed Europol Regulation

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I hope to assure the right hon. Gentleman that we will be there, influencing and seeking to negotiate the measure. We may not be opting in at the outset, but that should not in any way, shape or form be taken as the UK Government’s not wishing to seek to influence the measure and create the changes that we believe are necessary for us to consider a subsequent opt-in, post adoption.

The right hon. Gentleman will want to congratulate Rob Wainwright, whom he spoke to on his recent visit, on the important job that he is doing to make Europol an effective, well-managed and widely respected organisation in the fight against international crime.

We can point to other examples. Operation Golf, which has been cited several times previously in this House, was a joint UK-Romania investigation team targeting a specific Romanian organised crime network. Offences associated with the network included human trafficking, money laundering, benefit fraud, perverting the course of justice, theft, and handling stolen goods. Europol provided analytical support and facilitated real-time checks on its systems, and 126 individuals were arrested in the UK. Europol’s help in Operation Seagrape led directly to the identification of bank accounts used by a people-smuggling gang based near Dunkirk. French, Belgian and British agencies worked jointly to target a specific organised crime group, and 36 arrests were made. It is for those reasons that the Government believe that it is in the national interest to seek to rejoin the current arrangements for Europol agreed back in 2009 as part of the 2014 decision. That was made clear in our discussions in the previous debate.

However, that is not the matter before us now. Instead, we need to decide whether to opt into the new regulation, which sets down new rules and powers for Europol and, we believe, would change its relationship with member states in some quite troubling ways. Our first concern is with the proposals on data exchange. The Commission wants member states to share more data with Europol. That is a good idea in principle; after all, Europol can only be as effective as the information it holds. However, a strong legal obligation to supply it with data, as proposed in the draft regulation, is a different matter. It would undermine member states’ control over their own law enforcement intelligence, which we regard as absolutely fundamental.

Even more worrying is the fact that the draft regulation does not exempt member states from providing information even if it could damage national security, or endanger ongoing operations or an individual’s safety. These protections are explicit in the existing instrument governing Europol but absent from the new proposal. That is a significant change. The proposal also strengthens Europol’s power to request investigations. It can already do this to some extent, but the new proposal creates a presumption that member states will comply with a request. It also strengthens their duty to give reasons if they decide not to do so. That is particularly worrying because any reasons could be subject to challenge before the European Court of Justice.

The European Scrutiny Committee has asked whether article 276 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union would protect us from having a refusal challenged in the Court. We are not convinced that it would. Article 276 prevents the Court from reviewing

“the validity or proportionality of operations carried out by the police or other law enforcement services”.

It is highly debatable whether a decision to refuse to open an investigation would constitute

“operations carried out by the police”

because, by definition, no operation would have been carried out. We therefore do not think that article 276 provides enough protection against the Court’s involvement. This creates a real risk of the European Court being able to second-guess our policing priorities. That would simply be unacceptable. Policing is a core function of a sovereign state and it must remain a member state responsibility.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The Minister raises two concerns that I share to some extent. Presumably other member states have also had these concerns. What conversations has he had with them about whether other countries will be joining us to try to get this changed?

[James Brokenshire]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Discussions have already taken place and member states have voiced concerns. Our certainty faces a challenge because, as I will come on to say, there is an element of risk with regard to what will happen, given that there is qualified majority voting and the European Parliament can make a co-decision. Given the significance of the issues, it is right that we wait to see what the final measure looks like before deciding whether to opt in. I think that that is the right approach, which is why we tabled the motion. However, as I told the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, that does not mean that we will not engage in active discussions with member states, the Commission and others in order to seek to influence this measure as it is negotiated.

I have discussed the proposal personally with senior law enforcement officials from across the UK. Like us, the law enforcement community supports Europol as it is now, but the senior officers I spoke to agreed that our issues with the new text are real and serious.

On the Opposition’s amendment, the Government agree entirely that it is right to consult chief constables and law enforcement partners as part of this process. We have consulted senior law enforcement officers from across the UK, including the Metropolitan police and policing partners from Scotland and Northern Ireland. However, I ask the House to reject the amendment, because ultimately this is a decision for Parliament and the amendment does not contemplate Parliament coming to a view on whether we should opt in post-adoption.

Some hon. Members may argue tonight that we should opt into this proposal and negotiate out the elements that cause us concern. The problem with that is that the proposal is subject to qualified majority voting and we cannot guarantee that we would get the changes we need. We could quite easily be outvoted in Council, and then we would be bound by the final text, even if it contained elements we could not accept.

The Government are not prepared to take risks on something as important as this, which goes to the very heart of our law enforcement. We therefore intend not to opt in at this stage, but to remain fully engaged in negotiations and work with other member states and the European Parliament to push for the changes we need.

We know that member states and the EU institutions value our experience in this area. We have already had indications that others recognise our concerns and are prepared to work with us to try to find a solution.

We do not expect the regulation to be agreed much before the end of 2015. When it is agreed, we will consult Parliament on it again, depositing the final text with an explanatory memorandum, and, as this House knows from the handling of the human trafficking directive, we will be able to hold another debate at that time.

I stress that the Government’s position has no immediate implications for our participation in Europol. As I have said, we believe it is in our national interest to seek to rejoin the existing Europol legal instrument as part of the 2014 decision process. By doing so we will retain our full membership of the organisation throughout the negotiations, so nothing will change for the foreseeable future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hanson]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we wish to opt into Europol. I will explain our amendment in a moment. This is a take-note motion, and I want to put on record the Labour party’s view on these matters.

Europol has also dealt with investigations into credit card fraud, making 44 arrests this year in its investigation into a massive credit card fraud network, much of which was located in the United Kingdom. In answer to the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), yes, Europol is a good thing, and we wish to remain in it, but we also wish to discuss with the Association of Chief Police Officers the question of how we can remain in it in a way that is effective for the coalition Government and for the United Kingdom.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Mr Hanson]

If the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) wishes to intervene, I will be happy to let him do so.

[Dr Huppert]

That is very kind of the right hon. Gentleman, although I find it odd that, if he is so keen on opting in, he want to remove the bit of the motion that says we should opt in. My point, however, is why consult only with ACPO? He will be aware that ACPO is a private company limited by guarantee, so why not mention bodies such as the College of Policing, the Chief Constables’ Council or any other such bodies? What is the obsession with only the one entity, which is just a private company?

[Mr Hanson]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will allow me to make a case. ACPO does cover Scotland. There is ACPO Scotland and Northern Ireland ACPO—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman would calm down for a moment and allow me to continue rather than chirruping from the Front Bench, he will understand why I am raising the issue of ACPO. It has made severe criticisms of the Government’s approach, which I will reflect on in a moment.

Europol’s director, Rob Wainwright, recently told the European Committee in another place:

“It is undeniable that the demands of fighting international crime and terrorism require an ever-increasing level of co-operation between the member states.”

In my view and in his, and—I am pleased to say—that of the Government and the Liberal Democrats, Europol is a welcome institution. Today, however, we are considering the four or so areas where there are extensions to Europol’s activity in the new documents, which include extensions

“to strengthen and clarify the obligation for Member States to supply data to Europol in order for it to analyse…the information;”

to establish Europol links with data already in possession of member states to consider how we can process that in an effective way;

“to merge Europol and the European Police College…into a single EU agency, located”

not in the United Kingdom as is currently the case in Bramshill in Hampshire, but in The Hague; and an increase in

“parliamentary scrutiny of Europol by the EU Parliament and national Parliaments.”

The House of Lords Committee said that it wished to retain an opt-in to the proposals for European regulation. To assuage the hon. Members for Cambridge and for Cheltenham, that is the Labour party’s position on this take-note motion. In my view, however, the question under debate focuses on the words “post-adoption”. The Government’s proposal in the take-note motion states that the House

“agrees with the Government that the UK should opt into the Regulation post-adoption,”.

We are saying that the Government should consult ACPO, although I accept that that potentially involves a wider consultation about why and how the post-adoption issue should be approached.

I have in my possession a letter to the Minister from Allan Gibson, Queen’s Police Medal, who is the ACPO lead on extradition and mutual legal assistance. In it, he mentions a number of the reasons why this motion in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) was tabled to tease out from the Minister his position on a number of key issues.

The letter was sent to the Minister last week and states first and foremost:

“ACPO regards the UK’s continuing membership of Europol as highly beneficial to the national interest.”

I agree, the Minister agrees, and Liberal Democrat Members agree with that.

The letter goes on:

“ACPO supports the sharing of crime related intelligence and information between Member States facilitated through Europol…this facility has been a vital part of the development of more effective law enforcement cooperation across Europe and has made it possible to bring more offenders to justice and prevent crime.”

Again, I agree with that; I am not sure whether the Minister does, but I suspect that the Liberal Democrats do.

The letter continues:

“information exchange must be undertaken with appropriate levels of security and UK law enforcement would be keen to ensure that we had the necessary safeguards in place to protect highly sensitive intelligence and operations.”

I agree with that, which is why the Minister needs to consult in detail with ACPO on these matters to consider how we can do this without—dare I say this to Liberal Democrat Members—necessarily doing it post-adoption. In my view, they are being sold a fudge. They are being told that they can sign up to Europol, but they do so post-adoption.

I shall argue that post-adoption is an area of key concern, and one that we need to flesh out, consider in detail and come to a conclusion on. ACPO continued:

“Our view is that Europol membership is far too important to the UK to put at risk and adopting ‘a wait and see post-adoption opt in if we like it’ policy would not be the right approach.”

That is the view of ACPO, whose role is to look after, defend and develop crime-fighting potential in the UK. It continued:

“Such an approach would forfeit our opportunity to be seated around the table to influence our partners directly for one of signposting the basis on which we would rejoin, i.e. if our conditions are met.”

That is a very severe criticism, and it sets out why we need to maintain Europol membership. These are real concerns being placed on the record: in a letter to the Minister, ACPO said that it does not agree with his approach of a post-adoption opt-in. An explanation is needed, and we have tabled our amendment to explore these important issues of national security and data sharing to the satisfaction of the House, ACPO and others. We do not want to give up our seat at the table, as the proposed take-note motion proposes, in order to achieve our ends.

I welcome the Liberal Democrats’ support for Europol. Their policy briefing document states:

“We must not expose Britain to attack from criminal gangs. Liberal Democrats will keep Britain at the heart of international crime-fighting measures such as…the European Police Office (Europol) that the Conservatives want us to pull out of.”

[Interruption.] Sorry, I missed that comment from the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis).

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

There seems to be a wonderful outbreak of agreement about the value of Europol. I am not sure that all the Members who contributed to the last debate would subscribe entirely to that agreement, but certainly those of us who are here now do so, and that pleases me very much. However, wonderful as it is, Europol could be updated and reformed. I am glad that the Commission is proceeding with that task, and that we will see a new, improved Europol in 2015. I fear that the United Kingdom will be sidelined if we do not opt into the Europol regulation.

As I said earlier, almost half the 600 investigations that Europol is currently pursuing have links to the UK, and that is a huge factor for British policing. I will not list all Europol’s other wonderful merits, but I will make a connection with the last debate. I think it will have been an enormous waste of time, money and other resources if we decide to opt out of everything, then opt back into Europol in the negotiations leading up to 2014, and then get kicked out again in 2015. That strikes me as a very bizarre way of doing things.

Two key issues, which the Minister outlined very clearly, are data sharing and the proposal that would enable Europol to force the UK to initiate investigations. I do not think that those issues are as huge as some have made them out to be, but they have prompted concern, and it is right for us to deal with that. Data sharing is extremely important, but the changes that are being made are alarming. I think that many of the other member states would agree with us, and I suspect that neither of those proposals will be in the final version. Other countries will not want to share data when doing so could be too damaging. A certain amount of operational independence is necessary, and Britain should not break that principle.

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). Like him—and, I believe, the other Liberal Democrats—I should prefer simply to remain at the table in order to be in on the negotiations at the outset. I think that if we had a full voting seat and could shape the future of Europol, we would win on the two points that I have mentioned and, I suspect, many others. However, that is not an option, so I am very pleased that the motion commits the Government to opting into the regulation post-adoption as long as the provisions relating to data sharing and the initiation of investigations remain. That strikes me as a reasonable approach which will ensure that we have the benefits of Europol and can continue to play a leading role in it, and I hope that our membership continues under the existing framework in the meantime.

I suspect that the amendment was intended to probe, and to that extent I understand what the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) was trying to achieve, but if he decides to press it to a vote, I shall strongly disagree with his decision. I hope that this is merely a probing amendment, for a number of reasons. First, the amendment deletes the part of the motion that

“agrees with the Government that the UK should opt into the Regulation post-adoption”.

I suspect that whoever drafted it—I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman would not have made such an error himself—meant to remove the words after “post-adoption”. As it is, however, I should much prefer the House to agree that we will opt in as long as the conditions are met.

[Mr Hanson]

The hon. Gentleman will note that our amendment uses the words

“in deciding when to adopt the measure.”

That is because we want to engage in further discussion, but, as I explained in my speech, we do want to adopt the measure.

[Dr Huppert]

It still worries me that the amendment removes that clear commitment.

I am also concerned about the role of the Association of Chief Police Officers. ACPO covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but specifically does not cover Scotland, which has a separate body, ACPO Scotland or ACPOS. The ACPO logo lists the three nations that it covers, but ACPOS is a different body. There are many other police-related bodies, including the College of Policing and Policing Matters.

I understand the right hon. Gentleman’s intentions, and I suspect that we agree about what we are trying to achieve. His amendment serves very well as a probing amendment, but, as I have said, if he presses it to a vote I will not support it.

Europol deals with about 13,000 investigations a year, and it is a huge help to us. I am very pleased that we will seek to remain in the new, improved version.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

The right hon. Gentleman who chairs the Home Affairs Committee will know following the Lord Chancellor’s statement last week, that across Government the work he has called for is already under way to review all contracts that those companies hold with the Government, to check on how they are being conducted, and specifically on how they are charging the Government. That work is under way and colleagues will report to the House in due course.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The Minister will be aware that education is one of our greatest exports and we benefit hugely from genuine students who come to this country to study. Will he confirm that the Government will not introduce a cap on students who come here to study, and say that he would not support one?