Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

The minimum income requirement that comes into force today ensures that no one can any longer come to this country to get married and live off benefits from day one. I think that that will be widely welcomed.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I think it is very important that Ministers visit Heathrow at peak times. I was there at seven o’clock this morning and was appalled to see people being held in corridors, a full immigration hall and that half the kiosks were not open. May we please start the additional measures for the Olympics immediately?

[Mrs May]

Of course Ministers visit Heathrow and other ports at various times to see the operation of those ports in a variety of circumstances. At terminal 4 today, queues were in fact not over an hour long, as I understand the right hon. Gentleman has said that they were, staff were quickly redeployed and more than 80% of desks were open to process passengers as quickly as possible. That is what we have been doing by increasing the staff in recent days and in a week or so, the Olympic numbers will kick in, which will bring even more staff to Heathrow and ensure that people are processed properly and quickly.

UK Border Agency

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to open this important debate about not only the Home Office estimates but the Home Affairs Committee’s reports into the UK Border Agency. I am pleased to see the Minister and shadow Minister and so many right hon. and hon. Members who have direct experience of dealing with the UK Border Agency.

I particularly welcome members of the Home Affairs Committee who are here today. My hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) and the hon. Members for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) and for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) have made enormous contributions to the reports that the Select Committee has published in the past few years. The main feature of our reports is that they have been unanimous. Another feature has been our hope that with a succession of very carefully worded but carefully thought out reports we will be able to improve the quality of the UK Border Agency.

Right at the start, I want to make something clear. I have chaired the Home Affairs Committee for five years. We have produced our reports about the administration of the UKBA on a regular basis under the previous Government and the current Government, and we have been as critical in the former case as in the latter. There is no party political point in this; it is about trying to get the best possible service that can be provided to those who use the UKBA. We decided at the start of the Parliament to look regularly at how the UKBA operates, so every three months we revisit our report to see whether there has been any improvement in the system. We also decided to put up a number of key indicators by which we judge how the UKBA operates. It is not the usual kind of Select Committee report that has big and long recommendations; rather, we make specific suggestions that we want the UKBA to follow.

As the estimates indicate, the UKBA’s budget for 2012-13 is £1 billion, and it has a staff of 12,835, while the UK Border Force’s budget is £509 million, and it has a staff of 7,333. A number of ongoing issues arose under the previous Labour Government, and I shall touch on some of those. The first issue is foreign national offenders. There are 3,900 foreign national criminals living in the community who are subject to deportation, 57 of whom are part of the famous 2006 cohort who are still unable to be traced. In 2006, 1,013 foreign prisoners were released without any attempt being made to deport them. Of those, 844 people’s cases have been concluded, 399 people have been deported, 445 have not been deported, 93 are still in the process of being deported, 19 are serving another sentence, and 57 are untraceable. That situation has been ongoing for the past six years or so, and we will continue to monitor it until every one of those foreign national criminals has been found.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

Did my right hon. Friend’s Committee consider why, when someone is found guilty of a criminal offence in this country and sentenced to prison, we cannot find a way of sending them back to serve their sentence in the country that they came from, instead of having them serve it in our prisons so that we have problems years later in trying to send them back? My constituents are always asking me about this.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. These options need to be considered, as they were under the previous Labour Government in respect of Nigeria. Last Thursday, I was in her constituency with members of the Select Committee and we went to Brixton prison, where the governor told us that a third of the prisoners were foreign nationals and that he could not remember a single occasion when such a prisoner was removed at the end of their sentence; they were either taken into the community or made to report to a detention centre.

The Government need to be given credit for the fact that the average time taken to deport has been reduced from 131 days in 2008 to 74 days in 2011, but that is still far too long. There is still a lack of cohesion between the National Offender Management Service and the Home Office. UKBA staff are stationed at Brixton prison, but the problem is that the UKBA is not informed about cases involving foreign national criminals right at the beginning of the process, at the time of sentencing. We have recommended in successive reports that that should happen in order to shorten the period between the release of the prisoner and their being removed to his or her country.

In all the years I have been in this House, the main issue that has dogged the border forces has been the continual delays and backlogs that have gone on under successive Governments. We only recently discovered as part of our inquiry that a number of new, almost virtual reality, filing systems exist at the UKBA. There is the controlled archive which dates back to 2006; I prefer to call it the Tardis, because files go in there and seem never to come out. The controlled archive is the place where files are dumped in cases where the UKBA does not know where the people are.

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that one of the most significant reasons for the difficulty in returning people to their countries of origin is the fact that those countries, including some with which this nation has very good relations, often do not want them back and therefore obfuscate and create delay, making it much harder for us to deport them efficiently?

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that that is a problem, but that does not mean that we do not have to try to make sure that such deportations happen, because that would be a huge saving to the taxpayer and help us to meet the targets that the Government clearly want us to reach.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend referred to the TARDIS, as he calls it, but there are other cases in which people who have not yet been deported are simply categorised as “unknown issues”, so we have the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. That is a bizarre way of dealing with people, is it not?

[Keith Vaz]

It is indeed. There seems to be a paralysis on the part of senior officials of the UKBA, who just create more of these archives and move the backlog into different areas without trying to solve the problem.

The archive has now been reduced from 98,000 to 93,000, and from January to March 2012 it fell to 80,000. When Mr Whiteman, the chief executive of the UKBA, who has been brought in as a new broom to try to make sure that these matters are sorted out, last appeared before the Committee, he promised us that the archive will, in effect, be closed by 31 December 2012, and we will hold him to that promise. His predecessor, Lin Homer, who because of the fabulous work that she did at the UKBA has been promoted and is now one of the permanent secretaries at the Treasury, gave us a promise when she said, in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), who had requested that the legacy cases be concluded by the end of last summer, that every single legacy case would be concluded by the end of last year. [Interruption.]As can be seen from the reaction of right hon. and hon. Members here today, that has not happened. The UKBA has probably just created another of the filing systems where it puts various files when it does not know what has happened to the people involved.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that one of the key areas in which we need to hold the UKBA to account is data management? It is almost impossible to understand what is going on and who is going where if we do not have clarity and transparency about the numbers.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. She makes that point every time the head of the UKBA appears before us; I do not know whether she is an expert on data management. It is a big problem because, in the end, the immigration debate is about statistics. If the statistics are not right and we are unable to get the proper data, we cannot have an effective debate about what is happening.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

To go back to the controlled archive and the removal of old cases, is the right hon. Gentleman aware that new cases are still being added to it? It is very much like filling up a Jaguar car with petrol while leaving the engine on, so more petrol is needed at the pump.

[Keith Vaz]

As the hon. Gentleman will know from his case load, it is a continuing process. He will hear about more of these cases on Friday when he holds his surgery. The Select Committee is saying that the backlog must be cleared, not just put in a different part of the UKBA. It cannot just move the files from Croydon to Liverpool and expect the situation to be sorted out. It must clear the backlog once and for all. With the willingness to do so and the £1 billion of resources that are available each year, that should be possible.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

rose—

[Keith Vaz]

I will give way twice more, but then I must make progress because other Members want to speak.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I concur with what my right hon. Friend has said about clearing the backlog once and for all. One of my concerns is that, in the present exercise of dealing with legacy cases and the backlog, instead of making a final decision on cases—people used to be given indefinite leave to remain or were returned—lots of people are being given three years’ discretionary leave, which means that a new backlog is being created for three years’ time.

[Keith Vaz]

No one in this House knows more about these issues than my hon. Friend, having been the chair of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. She is right that decisions are being put off.

[Richard Fuller]

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that immigration is an issue of statistics. It may not be popular to say so, but does he agree that it is also an issue about the lives of individual people? In managing the statistics, we should not lose sight—no matter what the tabloids say—of the fact that we are talking about people who may have made a commitment to come here and who may have gone through extremely difficult circumstances to get here. How we treat such people should have just as much emphasis in our consideration as dealing with the statistics.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Yarl’s Wood is near his constituency, so he will have dealt with these kinds of cases. It is important that we look at the cases on an individual basis. Of course they form part of a grid, table or pie chart, but they involve individual people with real problems that we need to deal with.

I will move on to students, which is an issue of great interest to the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon. The Select Committee happens to contain not only the hon. Lady, but the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), so obviously student visas are an important issue to it. Of course, the fine universities of Northampton, Leicester, De Montfort and Rhondda are also represented in the Chamber. [Interruption.] If there is not a university of Rhondda, I am sure that there will be by the end of the week.

We love seeing the Minister for Immigration before the Committee, although we do not see him often enough. He is coming before us on Tuesday. When he last came before us, we talked about student visas. There is definitely a difference of emphasis between the Foreign Office, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Home Office. The Home Office feels that it is very important to reduce the number of students, and to reduce the intake only to the brightest and the best—whatever that means.

We all want to get rid of bogus colleges. That is why the Committee has pressed the UKBA to ensure that more of its visits are unannounced. The majority of its visits to colleges are still announced. People can therefore prepare for its arrival. We believe that it is important, as we have said in successive reports, that it just turns up on a Monday morning, a Friday afternoon or a Wednesday morning to see whether the college is operating. It is quite easy to do that. The UKBA does it for enforcement purposes. I have many examples of that. Indeed, the Home Secretary has given the example of a restaurant in her constituency, which she visited regularly and liked, being raided by the UKBA. It found that some of the workers were here illegally. If it is all right to raid restaurants, it should be all right to go into colleges to see whether they are bogus.

We and the university sector want as many genuine students to come here as possible, because if they do not come here, they will go to the United States of America. There is even evidence that France is setting up courses in English to attract people who do not want to apply to come to the United Kingdom. It is therefore important that we deal with student numbers.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

There are genuine students who apply to and are accepted by a college on the UKBA’s approved list only for the college to be delisted. Those students are given no opportunity to find an alternative course and are left high and dry. They, too, are victims of this system.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is right. I have many examples of people who have come to my constituency only for the colleges to be closed down. That has happened to one or two colleges in Leicester. Where do those people go in the meantime? The colleges are bogus, but the students are not. They have paid their money in good faith. They are then in limbo if they do not have a different educational establishment to go to.

[Nicola Blackwood]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Keith Vaz]

I will give way as we are talking about education and it is the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon who wishes to intervene.

[Nicola Blackwood]

As always, the right hon. Gentleman’s generosity is extraordinary. Does he agree that it is vital to get the message right on student visas? It must be clear that, although we are clamping down on illegal student immigration, we are still open to genuine student immigration, because it is vital to our higher education sector. We still need the brightest and best students to come to our fantastic universities, such as Oxford university and Oxford Brookes university.

[Keith Vaz]

I agree with the hon. Lady, but that is true not only of the elite, which includes Oxford and Oxford Brookes universities, but of all the other language schools and higher education colleges that provide such a wonderful service.

I will turn to family migration, which I know the Minister for Immigration will be asked about when he comes before the Select Committee on Tuesday. The new migration changes will come into effect on Monday. That, in my view, will be a disaster for the settled British Asian community. We are dealing not with people who come here illegally, but with the settled community, which the Prime Minister rightly praised recently at a big meeting of the Conservative Friends of India. Some 1,000 members of the diaspora turned up and listened to the Prime Minister’s speech. They liked what he said, but they will not like what the Minister and the Home Office are going to do on family visitor visas.

Last week, I was presented with a case involving a wedding that will take place in Leicester in three weeks’ time. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) and I will go along, as we do with every wedding in Leicester. Two sisters of the bride had applied to come over from Toronto. One sister had been allowed to come, but the other had been refused. I wrote a letter, because there was no time for an appeal. The appeals system is so awful and takes so long, as the Minister keeps telling us and the UKBA, that there was no point in appealing, because the appeal would have come up next year, well after the wedding. I therefore wrote to ask for a review. I wrote to my account manager, Saleah Ahmed, who is very efficient. He is a post box—he does not make the decisions, but sent my letter to New York, which is the hub for north America. The letter that I got back said, “Sorry, the second sister’s case cannot be looked at because we only look at cases where there is a death or serious injury.” The first sister will be able to get into the country for the wedding, but the second sister will not be allowed in, despite the additional evidence that I have sent in, which will not even be considered. If the bridegroom or the bride died, the decision might be reconsidered, but otherwise, the second sister will not be allowed into the country and will miss her sister’s wedding.

That situation will be repeated thousands and thousands of times when the right of appeal is removed and there is no effective system to deal with such problems. We have asked the Minister for meeting. I hope that he will meet Members from all parts of the House who have an interest in this matter. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), members of whose community I have met, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who must have a huge immigration case load, the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) and the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller)—I could go round the whole Chamber—will not like a system which means that they can no longer tell their constituents that there is a right of appeal. They will not like a system in which there is no review or in which the review will take longer than the period that is left before such a wedding. We will be inundated with cases and the system will collapse.

When I and other members of the Home Affairs Committee went to meet Jonathan Sedgwick, who heads the international section of the UKBA, he did not have a plan, because there was no ministerial plan in place. It is very important that we get such a plan in place before the changes take place. I do not like those changes, of course, but I will look at the plan that is on offer.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

I am sure my right hon. Friend is aware that the last Conservative Government abolished the right of appeal. As he said, when constituents who are sponsors write to us, we then write to the UKBA or the Minister and receive the predictable reply that the case was examined by the appropriate official, who took into consideration all the details and came to a decision. Writing to the Minister or the UKBA will get us no response other than one reaffirming the refusal. That is a denial of justice and means that the entry clearance officer is judge and jury, which is totally wrong and inappropriate. I hope the Minister will reconsider it.

[Keith Vaz]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s comments, although I have not made those points with quite the same passion and eloquence. This issue will simply not go away.

I hope that we will also consider the quality of refusal notices. I pay tribute to John Vine, who is doing a superb job as the independent inspector. He came before the Home Affairs Committee a few years ago, just after he was appointed, and I was worried that he would not be able to do a good job, but he has done a superb job. He makes the point that the process starts with the refusal notice. If that is not clear, we cannot make progress.

I do not know whether the Minister or other Members had the chance to see the Prime Minister’s appearance before the Liaison Committee yesterday. In his answer to my question about the UKBA, he was very clear that he did not believe bonuses should be paid if the job was not being done. The £3.5 million given to senior officials of the UKBA last year, in defiance of the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendation and the views of the Prime Minister and senior Ministers, who have no control over those bonuses, was wrong. Some 25% of the senior officials at the UKBA got a bonus of up to £7,000 each last year.

The Minister knows the problems of the UKBA. He knows about the queues at Heathrow airport and is well aware of what happened with the Brodie Clark saga. It is not an organisation whose senior officials are worthy of being given bonuses. When they do a good job, as Mr Whiteman has promised to do in the end, we can consider bonuses, but certainly not at the moment.

I hope that the Minister will assure us that the 7,000 people in the Border Force will be enough to deal with the inflow of the 5 million to 11 million people who it is estimated will come to the UK in the three-week period of the Olympics. I hope that the number of people that he promised would be at the airports to check people getting in will be forthcoming.

The Home Affairs Committee does not divide on its reports if it can help it, although on points of great principle my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) does his best to encourage us to be much more challenging—I was going to say divisive—in how we present our reports. We will continue to monitor the UKBA every three months, and we will continue to give it key indicators, of which there are 47 at the moment.

The one thing that really irritates the Committee is the fact that the UKBA delays in sending us information. I put that point to the Prime Minister in the Liaison Committee yesterday. That was a problem under the Labour Government and, I am sorry to say, there is still a problem under the current Government. We are dealing by and large with the same officials—Ministers have changed, but the officials and the culture remain the same. When we write to the UKBA and ask for information, we want a reply by a deadline, because when it writes to our constituents it expects a reply by a deadline. We want to ensure that the data that we ask for are put forward and that our requests are not left on a Minister’s desk waiting to be replied to. We shall continue to hold the organisation to account in a rigorous and robust way, and we hope that that will be of benefit to Members.

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[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) not only on the report of the Home Affairs Select Committee, which he chairs, but on what he said today, particularly how he ended his speech—on the abolition of appeal rights for visitors who are turned down.

If only because of the effluxion of time, as Winston Churchill called it, I have undoubtedly dealt with more immigration cases than any other Member ever has. At present, I have 71 cases on my “active” files, and as some are completed—occasionally positively but sometimes ending in despair—new ones flow in. When I hold my constituency advice bureaux, as I have done on the past two Saturdays, a preponderance of the cases I receive are immigration cases, and a substantial proportion of those who come to me are constituents of Pakistani or Bengali origin—although they do not all come from there; others are of African origin and so on. However, when I read in the newspapers, as I have done in the past few days, about a survey showing that people of Pakistani origin feel more British than anybody else in the country, I wonder how long it will last, given that the immigration service treats them as heartlessly, ineffectively, ineffectually and inefficiently as it does today.

I have dealt with Home Secretaries ever since I entered the House in 1970, but I do not deal with this Home Secretary because she is so arrogant that, unlike any other Home Secretary with whom I have corresponded, she will not touch an individual immigration case. For example, Douglas Hurd, among many other Tory Home Secretaries with whom I have had dealings, would not only deal with cases himself but, if I asked to see him about a case, which I rarely did, would immediately agree to see me. On one occasion, a man under a deportation notice said to me, “Let me see the Home Secretary so that he can tell me to my face why he is deporting me.” Douglas Hurd saw him, considered the case and reversed the decision, and that man is now living happily in Manchester with his family, who are now considerably grown-up. That was what Tory Home Secretaries such as Douglas Hurd, William Whitelaw, even Leon Brittan, were like. This Home Secretary believes she is too important to do what Douglas Hurd, Willie Whitelaw, Leon Brittan—and David Waddington and others—did.

[Keith Vaz]

In fact, given the abolition of the right of appeal, Members will want to go to Ministers much more often—that will delay Ministers and take up an enormous amount of their time—because there is nowhere else for them to go. They will be unable to go to the appeals system; they will have to go to Ministers.

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I accept that completely, but if my right hon. Friend will forgive me for apparently being patronising, he should not hope for too much from that process—in so far as it is a process.

It is not simply that the policy is a hard, harsh policy; individual cases are dealt with with a level of incompetence that would not be tolerated in pretty well any other area of activity. For example, last week the Minister for Immigration sent me a telephone number for a constituent to use when his DNA test had been completed—and it was completed successfully, I might say. The telephone number was wrong. That came from the Minister’s office, and with his signature. The Minister sometimes wonders why I insist on having my cases dealt with by a Minister. The answer is that the UK Border Agency is an agency, and a Minister’s signature on a letter is what a Member of Parliament has the right to have. We have only two rights: freedom of speech, within procedure, in this House; and access to Ministers. If we do not have those, we might as well not be here.

Let me give the House just a few examples of the botching that has gone on in cases I have dealt with. On 17 May, the Minister for Immigration wrote to me about a particular person, saying that a decision will be made on his application within the next four weeks. He came to me on Saturday, six weeks after that promise was made—no decision. Another constituent was told in a letter from the Minister that her application would be concluded within three months, yet it was not. What on earth is the point of him giving these specific commitments if they are to be broken?

Here is another one. The Minister wrote to me on 12 December 2011, saying that the case in question would be decided by the end of that month. By my calculation, we are into July 2012: no decision on that, after a promise by the Minister.

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[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

UKBA—the United Kingdom Borders Agency—might have a UK-wide remit, but it does not particularly serve Scotland. In Scotland, we have a different range of issues, challenges and priorities and the UKBA cannot even start to deal with our priorities.

We have issues to do with immigration and population, particularly concerning demography, and when I get to my feet I always try to set out why things are different in Scotland. I shall try to do it once again so that the House can more clearly understand. We occupy just over a third of the landmass of the UK but we have 8.4% of the population. We are one of the least densely populated parts of western Europe. Of course we need a different approach to immigration and our border agency, but will this Government consider any sort of policy that is regional or international within the UK? Not a bit of it. We have to experience the same decisions and policy as the rest of the UK and that is utter and total madness.

Our population reached 5.2 million in the course of last month, which is the highest population that Scotland has ever had. The Scottish Government issued a press release to welcome that fact. Could hon. Members imagine the UK Minister for Immigration ever putting out a press release welcoming the fact that the UK population was at an all-time high? That, more than anything, demonstrates the difference between Scotland and the UK.

What do we want from the UKBA? We want it to go away, basically. We need a specific Scottish agency which could serve our immigration priorities, our population necessities and our demographic needs. We have big problems. Our population is going up, but we do not know the medium to long-term prospects. There was a fear only a few months ago that Scotland’s population might dip below the iconic 5 million mark for the first time since the mid-20th century. That would have been a disaster for us. We have an ageing population and a shrinking working population and we need people to come to Scotland with specific skills and to meet specific requirements.

What the Government are doing to our universities is chaotic and disastrous and I want them to stop. We have more people coming to our universities from overseas than the rest of the UK; 19% of the students at Scottish universities come from overseas, as do 10% of the teaching staff. The competition for international students—the brightest and the best—is sensitive and fragile. The Government’s policies are deterring students from coming here and that is causing chaos for our universities. The Minister for Immigration has heard that from Universities Scotland, the CBI, the National Union of Students in Scotland and practically everybody who takes an interest. I ask him just to stop it. Leave our universities alone. Allow us to continue to attract the brightest and the best.

[Keith Vaz]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the Committee’s recommendation that student numbers should not be included in immigration statistics, because by their very nature genuine students will come and study, then return?

[Pete Wishart]

Quite right—why are students considered immigrants? They are here for only a few years.

We face particular issues with students at university, and I hope that the House will bear with me, as I should like to try to explain what they are. We need to continue to be a centre of excellence in Scotland. We have three universities in the top 100 in ratings around the world. Today, we have heard about the Higgs boson, whose existence was proposed by Peter Higgs, an Edinburgh university professor, which shows the excellence of Scottish universities. Those places are centres of excellence because we can attract the best and brightest, and we need to continue to be able to do so. However, we cannot do so if the new immigration rules and UKBA policies are implemented—and for what end? Students do not have recourse to public funds. They pay fees and maintenance, and have minimal impact on public services.

The benefits that we see in Scotland are not just financial, significant as they are—international students contribute £500 million to our economy. We gain so much by working with and learning from students from hundreds of countries who enhance our education system, our distinctive culture and Scottish society. We want to be at the forefront of the international marketplace for ideas and imagination. We want to continue to attract the brightest and best overseas academic talent to help build a smarter, wealthier and fairer Scotland. We want to welcome talented people to live, learn, work and remain here, but the proposals by the UK Government send out entirely the wrong message. They are already being perceived negatively overseas, deterring prospective students from applying to study across the UK, and that is particularly so in Scotland.

UKBA is simply doing its job: making tougher rules and enforcing them ever more rigidly. Perhaps the Minister for Immigration will confirm this, but I think that it is looking for a reduction of around 80,000 students across the UK—that is the target—and by heck it is going to achieve it regardless of the collateral damage to our universities. If it is bad for universities, tough luck. If we lose out on attracting the students we need for our economy and our institutions, too bad—UKBA has a job to do, and it is going to do it.

If it bad for students who now have to be relatively prosperous to come to the UK, for goodness’ sake they should not be poor and destitute if they are fleeing oppression, because in that condition they will undoubtedly remain. Our treatment of failed asylum seekers who cannot return to their country of origin because of fear of persecution or oppression should shame all in this House. There is almost positively a policy of destitution.

How is the UKBA dealing with people who are here legally?

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[Chris Bryant]

And wisdom is slowly descending upon her.

The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who is not in his seat but who, I am sure, will be back in a moment, referred to the fact that a large part of the casework of many hon. Members relates to the UKBA, and we heard the voice of those Members in the Chamber this afternoon. It was noticeable that only one Back-Bench Conservative Member made a speech in the debate, which is different from previous occasions. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) spoke on behalf of the Liberal Democrats.

The role of the UKBA is to provide an immigration system that is efficient, effective, humane and as watertight as possible, and it must surely be an own goal if people can come in and out of our country or overstay, willy-nilly or, if the system is so complex that it is easy to circumvent or utterly impossible for an ordinary sane person to understand, or if the queues are so lengthy at our airports or ports that the UK’s reputation as a place to do business or as a place to come as a tourist is harmed, or if it costs too much money to run.

In the motion that we are discussing, we are spending £11,034,371,000. That is a significant amount of money and our constituents would want to make sure that it was being spent well.

As the various reports referred to in the debate—two of which are by the Home Affairs Committee—have made clear, the UKBA has not had an easy time. Last summer’s experiments by the Home Secretary meant that warnings index checks were suspended 354 times. They were suspended on European economic area school groups of under-16s travelling by coach at juxtaposed controls, originally with the permission of Ministers. The policy was then extended to sea ports and the Eurostar, which Ministers were notified of, but from February 2011 the age restriction was completely lifted without any degree of permission. The agency’s records on the suspension of warnings index checks were extremely poor, as Mr John Vine has testified. The secure ID was suspended 482 times between June 2010 and November 2011, 463 of which were at Heathrow, the country’s busiest airport.

We understand that this was all supposedly because the UKBA interpreted the Immigration Minister’s letter of 27 January 2011 as approval to lift the secure ID. He believes that that was not his intention whatsoever. The Home Secretary made clear her opposition to the moves being mooted on 13 April, yet it continued. This is obviously a sign of an organisation in chaos. Indeed, the independent chief inspector’s report states that

‘the language used in both the “Summer pressures” submission to Ministers and the response provided’—

in other words, by Ministers—

“was not clear and as a result was open to misinterpretation… there was confusion amongst staff”

not least because the Home Secretary’s office note did not clearly define any of the terms being used.

I would like to refer to another report by the independent chief inspector, on border control operations at Heathrow terminal 3 from August to November 2011, the same period covered by the Home Affairs Committee’s report. The inspector identified even more worrying signs, first of an

“inconsistent application of border security checks”,

and secondly of “completely inadequate” record keeping in two thirds of the cases examined. That matters, because all the references we have heard in the debate to paperwork further down the system being inadequate, poorly looked after, incomplete or disappearing into the black hole, or the Tardis, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East referred to it, stem from inadequate record keeping at the beginning. However, the report found such inadequate record keeping not only at terminal 3, but at Gatwick’s north terminal.

In addition, the inspector found:

“The introduction of team based working in July 2011, coupled with a new shift working system and the amalgamation of immigration and detection roles at Heathrow was far too much organisational change during the busiest time of the year at Heathrow.”

That goes to the heart of the point my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington made on how staff morale can be kept up so that they do an effective and efficient job if they are trying to cope with so much change at the same time. Perhaps we are demanding too much of them. The inspector also found that all this was

“complicated by staff reductions of 15% at Terminal 3”.

We want secure borders, but it is difficult to provide them if we do not provide enough resources to allow the job to be done properly. When I visited Stansted on Monday to see the operation there, staff working for the UKBA made it clear to me that all the new staff who have been drafted in to help in the run-up to the Olympics and through the games receive only three days of training. They are unable to do the full job that is necessary and, consequently, there is a real security problem. In addition, the fact that they are suddenly recruiting back from retirement people who were made redundant only last year makes it look as if they do not really know what they are doing.

The report also found that:

“The Agency was failing proactively to deal with absconders,”

and I really want to raise that issue with the Minister, because there is a serious problem with absconders, and it is not just at terminal 3—although the report found that it had increased there

“by 62% between 2009 and 2011.”

Indeed, not only did the figure for those absconding go up, but the figure for people who were captured having absconded went down, falling from 40% to 16%, meaning that during that period alone some 150 people absconded—and have not been found.

I raise the matter because I worry that the general level of absconders is rising throughout the country, so, first, I should be grateful if the Minister said how many people who have been told that they are no longer able to stay in this country are still in this country. Can he pitch a figure? Is it 100,000, 150,000, 250,000? I suspect that it is about 150,000.

Secondly, the Government and the UKBA have absolutely no idea where many of those people may be, or whether they have left the country, and that must surely be a concern, so can the Minister confirm whether all absconders are added to the national police computer, either as wanted or with a local trace mark, so that when somebody pops up in another area it is possible to track them down? If they are not, the UKBA is failing in its task.

I raise one other problem in relation to the independent inspector’s report, namely that of measuring queues. I noticed at Stansted that the UKBA starts measuring the length of a queue only from the moment at which someone enters the terminal building, but the queues often start long before the terminal building, and the time from the moment someone enters the terminal to their passport being dealt with is normally only 20 minutes, because the vast majority of the queue is backed up way down a series of tunnels, on trains and, sometimes, on aeroplanes, so I am distrustful of the figures for queuing times at Stansted.

[Keith Vaz]

I, too, went to Stansted, albeit at a different time from my hon. Friend, and the problem is that, when British citizens return to their own country, they are held by airline officials just before they join the escalators, all the way back to the plane, and that, when they reach the immigration hall, half the kiosks are un-personned.

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, “un-personned”: very correct of my right hon. Friend.

In addition, one of the biggest problems, which applies not only to Stansted but elsewhere, is that many staff who have been brought in to help in the run-up to the Olympics, a known problem that is coming along the track, are not able to work with non-EU passengers, and consequently the moment any arrive there is an enormous back-up. Further, when I was there on Monday morning not a single e-gate was working, and I understand that they were not working at any point at all on Monday.

The fact that e-gates are not working effectively is a significant problem across the estate and at several different ports. When IRIS finally goes in September, the real problem will be whether we have any automated system on which we can rely, so I should be grateful if the Minister commented on the future of automation.

I have one final complaint in relation to the inspector’s report, because at Heathrow terminal 3 there was a 58% drop in the issuing of IS81 forms, on which a passenger is told that they will be subject to further interrogation. That is important, as all too often in a simple desire to cut queues, we are cutting back on security, because staff are not able to do their job properly.

There is a further problem in relation to foreign national prisoners. Of the 5,012 who completed their sentences in 2010-11, 3,248 were removed, 471 were allowed to remain but the cases of 1,300—a staggering figure—are still outstanding. Only 500 of those are detained. There are other unspecified issues with 20 of them and, as I said earlier, 27% of them—some 350—are just categorised as unknown issues. In other words, the UKBA has next to no idea about what is happening with those people or about the likelihood of moving forward in a way that makes their lives easier or our country more secure.

In addition, immigration tribunals overturn UKBA decisions a dramatic number of times—41% of appeals are lost by the UKBA. That is a significant problem. Obviously, it delays people’s ability to get on with their lives and it is a significant additional expense for the UKBA. How will the Minister tackle the problem of so many appeals being lost at tribunal?

I have a minor comment to make about the common travel area, also at Stansted. It was pretty clear that it would be easy for someone to negotiate their way around without going through proper border controls, having printed off a boarding pass pretending that they had flown in from Ireland when in fact they had flown in from somewhere else. I hope that the Minister will be able to close that loophole.

My final point is that the Government are planning to cut staff at the UKBA by 5,300. I believe that that will make it phenomenally difficult for the agency to do its job effectively. In particular, in the run-up to the Olympics, which everybody knew were coming along, we have already seen how difficult it has been to maintain strong security and a decently short length of queue.

Lots of people have been flown in from different parts of the country as emergency measures in the run-up to the Olympics, and the relevant people have been prevented from taking holidays during the Olympics and Paralympics. My concern is that the moment that is over, it will be phenomenally difficult for the UKBA, without those resources, to get anywhere near doing its job properly. We can complain about the UKBA, but if we do not give it the resources to do its job properly, our complaints are worth nothing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

I will speak only very briefly because the Home Affairs Committee does not want to intrude on the time available for the Foreign Affairs Committee’s debate, which is about to begin.

I thank all Members who have taken part in the debate. They have all talked about their strong local relationships, and I want to pay tribute to my own caseworker, which I forgot to do earlier. Everyone else has paid tribute to theirs, so I should thank Diana Cank for her work.

The Home Affairs Committee will continue to scrutinise the UKBA in a robust way. We look forward to seeing the Minister before the Committee on Tuesday, and we will publish our next report in about three weeks.

Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54).

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I have now to announce the result of the Division deferred on the Question relating to the draft Police and Crime Commissioner Elections Order 2012. The Ayes were 304 and the Noes were 209, so the Question was agreed to.

I have now to announce the result of the Division deferred on the Question relating to the draft order on the amendment of curriculum requirements. The Ayes were 317 and the Noes were 199, so the Question is agreed to.

[The Division lists are published at the end of today’s debates.]

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to tell the House that an annual review is undertaken in respect of all the proscribed organisations. I also note the recommendation from David Anderson, the independent reviewer on terrorism, in respect of a mechanism for de-proscription. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we are examining that recommendation carefully, and that we will respond to David Anderson’s report in due course.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The Select Committee’s report on the roots of radicalism supported what the Government were doing, but suggested that the matter needed to be looked at. It is six months since the publication of the report. Given that the Minister is now bringing another organisation before the House, will he tell us when we can expect a definitive answer from the Government on what form that mechanism will take?

[James Brokenshire]

I acknowledge the Select Committee’s interest. Indeed, I gave evidence to the Committee, and I remember the questions that the right hon. Gentleman asked me during the evidence sessions. The matter is being considered, in relation to the Select Committee’s report and in the context of the recommendation made by the independent reviewer. All I can say is that we will make a further announcement in due course. Unfortunately, I cannot give the right hon. Gentleman a more specific answer now, but I acknowledge the point that he is making, and we will respond to the points made by the Select Committee and by the independent reviewer shortly.

We recognise that proscription is a tough but necessary power. Its effect is that the proscribed organisation is outlawed and unable to operate in the United Kingdom. Proscription makes it a criminal offence for a person to belong to, or invite support for, the proscribed organisation. It is also a criminal offence to arrange a meeting in support of the organisation, or to wear clothing or carry articles in public that could arouse reasonable suspicion that an individual was a member or supporter of the relevant organisation.

Given the wide-ranging impact of proscription, the Home Secretary exercises her power to proscribe an organisation only after thoroughly reviewing all the available relevant information and evidence on that organisation. Having carefully considered all the evidence, she firmly believes that IM is involved in terrorism. Hon. Members will appreciate that I am unable to go into much detail, but I am able to give them the following information. IM is a terrorist organisation based in India. It emerged in 2007. It uses violence in its attempts to achieve its stated objectives of creating an Islamic state in India and of implementing sharia law there.

The organisation has frequently perpetrated attacks on civilian targets, such as markets, with the intention of maximising casualties. In May 2008, for example, a spate of bomb detonations in the city of Jaipur killed 63, and in September last year an explosion outside the high court in Delhi reportedly killed 12 and injured 65. IM has sought to incite sectarian hatred in India by deliberately targeting Hindu places of worship. An example of that was an attack on a prayer ceremony in Varanasi, which killed a child, in December 2010.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I do not wish to detain the House, as I know many of the Members present want us to move on. I can tell them that, given what we have heard from the Front Benches, I do not believe that the House will divide.

When we proscribe an organisation, it is important that we do so carefully, because it is something we do very rarely. Such a move is also almost never opposed by the Opposition. That has certainly been the case throughout all the years that I have been Home Affairs Committee Chair and, indeed, in Parliament—and throughout all the years you have been in Parliament, Madam Deputy Speaker. In all that time, I have never known Government and Opposition to disagree on the proscription of an organisation. We will support the Government order because I am sure that the Home Secretary will have taken good advice before proscribing this organisation, and that she will not have taken the decision lightly.

However, the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), was right to press the Minister on a number of issues concerning the operation of the organisation within the UK. The Minister is right: the Indian Government have banned the organisation, as it has conducted a number of atrocities, most recently in Mumbai in 2011. However, I represent a constituency that, on the last census, has more people of Indian origin than any other constituency in the country, and I am not aware of this organisation operating in the UK. The Home Secretary obviously knows better than I, so I am happy to take her lead, but it is important that we proscribe for a reason.

The hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) rightly says we should not act in isolation. The Minister named five countries, including New Zealand, but there needs to be better co-ordination among countries, so that when we ban an organisation in our country, that applies also in other countries in the EU, because it would not of course be acceptable for that organisation to continue to operate in France, for instance, while being proscribed in the UK. I am sure that when the Minister replies he will confirm that we will also be asking other EU countries to make this decision, as well as other international organisations with which we are associated, and that we will act together with other countries that are friendly to the UK.

My main point goes back to an issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), however, and it is specifically about proscription. When the Select Committee produced its unanimous report into the roots of radicalism—I note that the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), a distinguished brain on the Committee, is present—we were very clear about the issue of de-proscription. We looked at the example of the People’s Mujahedeen Organisation of Iran. It took the then Government to court and it won, and that Government had to allow it to continue. We do not want to go along that path again. There needs to be a clear route for organisations that have become clean, or that have got rid of their terrorist operations—and for their supporters who may support certain causes but who do not support terrorism—to be able to be part of an exercise of de-proscription.

The excellent independent reviewer, David Anderson, proposes time-limiting proscription, so that Governments have to come back in two years and renew the proscription. The Select Committee has not taken a view on the time limit, but we certainly feel that there ought to be some such mechanism. The Minister has given us an answer, but I am afraid that it is similar to some of the letters I have received from the Home Secretary and other Ministers that use the words “in due course”. I know that when we use the seasons—spring and summer, for example—that can mean virtually anything and I know that “shortly” does not necessarily mean tomorrow, but “in due course” sounds like quite a long time. Clearly this will not happen before the recess, as that is in 10 days’ time, but it would be good to have a timetable so that people know what to expect.

I raise these issues because of my concern about my constituents who are members of the Tamil community. They still face difficulties in booking halls when they want to discuss Tamil issues because of the ban that remains on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. As the Minister knows, the LTTE lost the war in Sri Lanka, effectively all its leaders were killed and the organisation no longer exists. If he wants to take advice other than mine, he should talk to my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) and especially to the hon. Member for Ilford North (Mr Scott), who is, of course, a member of the Minister’s party and the chairman of the all-party group on Tamils. These members of the Tamil community wish to operate within the law and have no connection with the LTTE, but they still have difficulties in raising money for compassionate and charitable reasons because of the ban that remains on that group.

How do we de-proscribe an organisation that does not exist? Who makes the application when no members of the LTTE are operating in the United Kingdom? Who will write a letter to the Home Secretary to say, “Dear Home Secretary, please de-proscribe us” when the group no longer exists? The previous Government, whom my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) and I supported—although my hon. Friend was not a Home Office Minister in that Government, so I cannot hold her responsible—were unable to come to this House and say that they would de-proscribe any organisation. How will the Government demonstrate their good faith, therefore, not just as regards what they are doing today, which I fully support for the reasons set out by the Minister—many of which we obviously take on good faith because we have not seen the files—but by ensuring that there is a mechanism in law that will satisfy our constituents in cases such as the one that I have raised?

Proceeds of Crime

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Brokenshire)]

I beg to move,

That this House takes note of European Union Document No. 7641/12 and Addenda 1 and 2, a draft Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the freezing and confiscation of proceeds of crime in the European Union; and supports the Government’s intention to not opt-in under Protocol (No. 21) to the European Union Treaties at this stage.

I welcome the opportunity to debate this important draft directive in the House this evening, but I should say at the outset that I am sorry that it has had to be scheduled on a day when a number of members of the European Scrutiny Committee cannot be present. It was originally scheduled for 23 May, but it was necessary to move it in order to give more time to consider fully the views of operational partners before deciding whether or not to opt in. Given the weight of parliamentary business and the limited time available before the opt-in deadline, it was not possible to find a time for this debate when members of the European Scrutiny Committee had returned from their pre-presidency visit to Cyprus. That is not as I would have wished, and I have offered to meet the Committee Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), to discuss the directive.

I also recognise that, in order to inform these debates, we must ensure that the House is informed at an earlier stage of the Government’s position on such directives. I have written to the European Scrutiny Committee Chair to underline the high priority that I attach to ensuring that this process and these debates provide more effective scrutiny, and my officials will work with the Clerk of the European Scrutiny Committee and with the European Union Committee in the other place to that end. I am also arranging a discussion with the Minister for Europe to consider how the matter might be addressed effectively.

On the subject of the motion, asset recovery is a hugely important weapon in our efforts to tackle organised crime. The proceeds of crime are not only a central motivation for organised criminals; they fund further criminality. Freezing and confiscating criminal finances hurts organised criminals and protects the public, and I have no doubt that right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House will have examples of when the use of asset recovery has been a very effective weapon in providing relief to communities from serious organised criminals. It is an effective means of tackling and putting increased pressure on organised crime groups.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The Minister is absolutely right, but we must do much better, and the better way is to make sure that there is more co-operation between EU countries on ensuring that those who try to find a safe haven for their money in another EU country are caught and their money confiscated as quickly as possible.

[James Brokenshire]

The right hon. Gentleman, the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, makes an important point about international co-operation—one that we certainly recognised in the organised crime strategy that was published last summer. Criminals may wish to hide or to secrete assets not only in the EU, but throughout the world, so the need to look at the matter in an international context is an important one to which I shall return during my contribution.

In our domestic legislation, we have taken some important steps forward. The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is the principal piece of domestic legislation for the restraint and confiscation of the proceeds of crime. It is an advanced and powerful piece of legislation that in most areas goes beyond the minimum standards of the directive that we are debating this evening. It provides a single scheme for the confiscation of the value of the proceeds of crime, following any criminal conviction and regardless of the amount.

If a defendant has been convicted of a listed serious offence or has a number of convictions, the court can assume that all their property is the proceeds of crime and can be factored into the amount of a confiscation order, a power known internationally as “extended confiscation”. It allows for the confiscation of assets that have been transferred to family members or other third parties; it enables the freezing of assets by a court from the beginning of an investigation in order to prevent their dissipation; and it provides civil recovery powers, an intrinsic part of our approach to this area of law, whereby the focus is on the property, not on the person who holds it, and no conviction is required. That is a particularly useful tool for tackling high-level organised criminals for whom it is hard to obtain a conviction.

In 2010-11 UK law enforcement agencies froze or recovered more than £1 billion of criminal assets. The amount of assets recovered has increased year on year since the 2002 Act, and one of this Government’s first steps on entering office was to do away with some of the arbitrary targets that the previous Government imposed on law enforcement professionals. This has galvanised their professionalism and their approach to ensuring that more assets are recovered or frozen. Certainly, the UK is recognised as a leader in this field. However, the Government want to do more, particularly on international asset recovery, as we made clear in our organised crime strategy of July 2011.

In 2008, it was estimated that some £560 million-worth of UK criminal assets were held abroad. That underlines the level of sophistication that a number of organised crime groups are seeking to deploy in order to hide or to shield assets. Improved international co-operation is therefore a necessary step towards recovering that money. That is why we welcome the aims of the directive, if not some of its provisions. It is right that we seek to drive up standards throughout the EU and find better ways of working together with our EU partners. To that end, the directive covers confiscation following a criminal conviction, extended confiscation, third-party confiscation, non-conviction-based confiscation, and powers to freeze assets. The UK already has all those powers under the Proceeds of Crime Act, and so, in almost all areas, we exceed the minimum standards established by the directive.

The purpose of the directive is to require member states to be able to freeze and confiscate the proceeds of cross-border serious and organised crime. The Commission argues that the confiscation of the proceeds of crime in the EU is under-utilised despite the existing EU legal framework. It says that there are three problems with the current EU legal framework: its incomplete or late transition into domestic law, diverging national provisions that make mutual recognition more difficult, and the low utilisation of confiscation in practice. The directive therefore creates minimum standards for the freezing, management and confiscation of the proceeds of crime. The Commission intends that minimum standards will lead to greater co-operation, but a mutual recognition instrument has not yet been published.

It is vital that we get the detail right, and we must pay great attention to the effect of the directive on our existing domestic regime and its likely operational impact. In that regard, the Government have identified a serious problem with the directive. As drafted, it poses a very real threat to our domestic non-conviction-based confiscation regime. Operational partners have expressed concern that opting in at this stage poses a risk to the powers used by our law enforcement agencies to target and disrupt the most serious organised criminals. Our non-conviction-based confiscation powers are civil law measures that allow prosecution agencies to take action against property that they think has been acquired through unlawful activity. The action is not taken against an individual, and no criminal conviction is necessary. As I said, it is a particularly useful tool for tackling the high-level organised criminals against whom it is very difficult to achieve a criminal conviction.

In 2011-12, approximately £20 million-worth of criminal assets were recovered using non-conviction-based confiscation powers. It is important to note that the Proceeds of Crime Act, and the use of the civil standard of proof as structured within the Act, has been upheld by the Supreme Court, and therefore its operation has been subject to judicial scrutiny at the highest level. Because of its criminal law legal base, the directive risks placing non-conviction-based confiscation measures in the UK on to a criminal law footing, opening new avenues of legal challenge to our powers and, in many ways, undermining the court judgments that have been secured in relation to the operation of the Proceeds of Crime Act. If criminal law procedural protections and a criminal law standard of proof were introduced, our domestic regime would be severely weakened and our law enforcement agencies would find it harder to disrupt the workings of some of the most dangerous organised criminals.

This is a technical argument, but it is of great importance to the law enforcement agencies that protect our country from organised crime. Under qualified majority voting, there is no guarantee that we can secure the necessary changes to the text. This Government will not risk hindering the work of law enforcement agencies in tackling high-level criminality. The risk is simply too great.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I do not know whether he was implying that the Government were holding the debate this evening because the European Scrutiny Committee had gone to Cyprus, but I am glad that he was left behind—or remained behind—to participate in it.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I should have thanked the Government rather than criticising them, because they gave me a chance to speak for a little longer than normal.

[Keith Vaz]

I am sure that the Government are most grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s thanks.

Last night I was present at the launch of a document produced by the hon. Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns) about the operation of the European arrest warrant and what it has delivered over the last few years. I know that the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) is a frequent commentator on its justice and home affairs implications for our country.

I think that we should be cautious in dealing with these matters. The EU document needs to be considered with great care. I am not one of those who believe that we need a directive in order to secure co-operation between EU partners, but I think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) deserves the explanation that he seeks. I think that he deserves to be told why the Minister in the other place was so enthusiastic about the directive, and why the Government have apparently changed their mind. Of course, if there is a valid explanation, and if the various agencies—the Serious Organised Crime Agency being one of them—make representations to the Government pointing out that this is going to create problems for our legislation, it is important that that advice is shared not only with the Minister, but with the House.

The hon. Member for South Ribble (Lorraine Fullbrook) and I recently returned from an official visit to Colombia as part of a Home Affairs Committee delegation, where we were looking at the drugs trade. We noted a very important fact: only 2.6% of the profits from the trade in cocaine remain in Colombia. Some 97% of cocaine profits are administered and laundered within the European Union—in our country and other countries of the EU. That means that our existing structures are not used appropriately enough to catch the people who are responsible for drugs having become the biggest illicit activity in the world.

Even though a directive would help, it will not provide the answer. The Government are right not to opt in unless and until there are further negotiations, therefore. We need to make sure that the structures that are in place in the various countries of the EU can work together to catch those responsible for laundering the profits from drugs. I hope that the Government will use the time that will be available to them as a result of their decision not to opt in constructively and productively, and that they look at the institutions and organisations and make sure that that co-operation is improved. There are, of course, organisations—such as Europol and Interpol—which can be used effectively. I do not think Europol is used enough. We have a very good British director of Europol, Rob Wainwright, who was trained at SOCA. We must co-operate much more closely, without legislation from Brussels being needed.

Drugs is one example. The other is human trafficking, which is the third biggest illicit activity in the world, with profits of £32 billion a year. Through our co-operation with the Romanian authorities in Operation Golf, we showed that it is possible to have mutual co-operation with other EU countries without having a further directive, if there is willingness on the part of our European partners to work with us to deal with illegal activity.

[Mark Reckless]

The right hon. Gentleman mentions Europol and the issue of trafficking. Does he recall that when the Home Affairs Committee visited the Greek-Turkish border, one of the issues we found was that the structures of Europol were not well designed to secure co-operation with Turkey? Very often, the European basis of Europol and the insistence on doing everything through that framework was getting in the way of practical co-operation.

[Keith Vaz]

I am happy to agree with the hon. Gentleman, who is also a fellow member of the Home Affairs Committee; he is absolutely right. The EU looks at these issues only within the confines of the EU. Because Turkey is not a member, it is not included in any aspects of co-operation. An example of that is the way the RABITs were deployed in Greece to deal with illegal immigration. Because the UK was not part of Schengen, we were not allowed to be a formal part of the activity of the RABITs. As a result, we were left marginalised.

Mr Speaker, I can see that you are about to tell me that I am out of order. [Interruption.] Oh, you are not. You were frowning, Mr Speaker, and I have known you long enough to know that a frown may have indicated that you were about to stop my flow. Let me go back to the original reason behind this debate. I was tempted along the other path by the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless).

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am sorry if the right hon. Gentleman was concerned that I was frowning. Perhaps I can satisfy simultaneously his curiosity and that of the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I have made inquiries, as the hon. Member for North East Somerset would expect, and I am now in a position to tell him and the House that the word in question, maximal, is the penultimate word in the second column of page 1,720 of the new “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary”. I know that the hon. Gentleman already knew that, but I am just reminding him.

[Keith Vaz]

I am enormously grateful that my speech will go down in history as the one in which you made such an important ruling, Mr Speaker, and thank you very much for choosing my speech in which to do it.

Let me conclude by saying that I hope the Minister will use the time available to the Government to make sure that the structures I have described are used to their maximum to ensure that we get the greatest amount of co-operation.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Before the right hon. Gentleman finishes, will he kindly tell me what the heck a RABIT is?

[Keith Vaz]

Of course. A RABIT—rapid border intervention team—is a rapid deployment force used by the EU to go to countries that face influxes of migrants who are illegally trying to enter the European Union. It is not the furry thing that runs around the hon. Gentleman’s constituency.

When the Minister winds up—I will read his reply in Hansard, and I apologise, Mr Speaker, for not being here for the wind-ups—I hope that he will look at the issue of the new National Crime Agency to see whether any of this affects the way in which the NCA is going to deal with the mutual co-operation that exists between our agencies and other EU countries. I have mentioned the visit that the hon. Member for South Ribble and I made to Colombia. The one agency that was praised, from a front-line commander in the middle of the jungle that we visited to the President of Colombia, President Santos, was the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It was praised particularly for the way in which it has worked with the Colombians and with other Governments throughout the world to combat illegal drug activity.

[James Brokenshire]

As the right hon. Gentleman will not be here for the wind-ups let me say now that I will reflect on his comments. I am certainly very appreciative of and recognise the work that SOCA undertakes around the globe in a number of different regions. The development of the NCA, and certainly the utilisation of legislation on the proceeds of crime, will be part of our approach to strengthening and developing our response to organised crime. The NCA is one part of that.

[Keith Vaz]

I thank the Minister for that answer.

Finally, when we spend money on organisations such as SOCA, on which we spend £0.5 billion pounds a year, we expect value for money. We expect it to be able to go out there and seize assets. At the end of the day, that is how the public will judge the effectiveness of these organisations. Working with our European partners can only help us to achieve that. We do not need more legislation or, necessarily, more directives, but we do need the co-operation of our partners to succeed.

Family Migration

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I thank my right hon. Friend for those questions, and they serve to remind me that I did not answer the point made by the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) about the next steps we might take if what we are doing does not lead to a change in the sorts of decisions coming from the courts. If that is the case, we will, indeed, look at further measures, and they could, of course, include primary legislation. I can assure my right hon. Friend that both the Justice Secretary and I have an interest in trying to ensure that as many foreign national prisoners as possible are removed from this country, including being removed to serve their sentence elsewhere.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I support what the Government are doing on article 8, which is in keeping with the Select Committee’s recommendations on the removal of foreign national prisoners, but I profoundly disagree with the Home Secretary’s proposals on spousal visas. The effect of that change will be directed against the British Asian community—not against illegal immigrants, but against settled Britons who are here, pay their taxes and contribute to this country. I do not believe that the British Home Secretary should be determining who the spouse of a British citizen should be based on an arbitrary limit—on an arbitrary financial limit. I urge the Secretary of State to look again at these proposals. She should look at the limits and see how this would affect a city like Leicester.

[Mrs May]

What I think is absolutely right is that the British Government should say that if somebody is bringing somebody in here to be their spouse or partner, they should be able to support that individual and the family life they are going to have. That is important, and that is what the Government are saying. The right hon. Gentleman talks about the income threshold being arbitrary, but it is not arbitrary. The Migration Advisory Committee looked at various levels of income and this was the level it said was the point at which people could generally support themselves without having to be reliant on income-related benefits. It suggested a higher level to us as well, but we chose this level. I think it is right that people should be able to support the individual they are bringing in to be their partner or spouse.

Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I do agree. My hon. Friend makes an important point about the role of police and crime commissioners. They will indeed be the voice of local policing, and I am sure that as such they will want to ensure that police officers are spending as much of their time fighting crime—and not doing paperwork—as they can, and that they will be a powerful force in removing bureaucracy from the police.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

In evidence to the Select Committee, the chief constables of the West Midlands and Surrey informed the Committee that £5 million had been allocated to work with the private sector in order to cut costs and reduce administrative burdens. Given what happened at the Police Federation conference last week, would it not be a good idea for the Home Secretary to sit down with all the stakeholders to discuss exactly what the role of the police should be in the 21st century, rather than there being a public dispute between the Government and the police?

[Mrs May]

I have made it absolutely clear that the focus of the police is on fighting crime. I have set them only one target, which is to cut crime. Indeed, it is right that forces up and down the country are now looking—as they have done for several years, including under the last Labour Government—at bringing in the private sector to their forces where they feel that functions can be done more cost-effectively by the private sector. But I have also made it clear—as I did at the Police Federation conference last week—that we will not move the powers of warranted officers from officers to the private sector.

Home Affairs and Justice

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

Obviously I welcome the fact that the European Court came out and refused Abu Qatada’s application for referral yesterday. As I told the Home Affairs Committee, I had been strongly advised that that was expected to happen because of the case that we had made.

Of course I accept that the Court has made its decision on the matter of the deadline. The Government still do not agree with that decision—[Interruption.] As I have said, we accept the Court’s decision. I made clear at every stage to the House and to the Home Affairs Committee that it was only ever going to be that panel of judges that finally decided whether the referral could be accepted. However, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office wrote to the European Court today drawing attention to inconsistencies in the guidance that it had published on how to calculate the date, and asking it to clarify the position for future purposes and provide revised guidance.

I was talking about the Crime and Courts Bill, and the matters relating to the criminal justice system that it reflects. We will ensure that fines represent real justice by making defaulting offenders, not the taxpayer, pay the cost of collection. A single county court and a single family court will be established to increase the efficiency of the civil and family court systems, and the judicial appointments process will be reformed to introduce greater transparency, flexibility and diversity. Court broadcasting will be allowed, in limited circumstances, to help to demystify the justice system. We will improve the efficiency of our immigration system by removing full appeal rights for family visit visas and removing in-country appeal rights for excluded persons, and we will strengthen our borders by extending the powers of immigration officers to tackle serious and organised immigration-related crime.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I am glad that the Home Secretary acknowledges that the unequivocal advice about the deadline was wrong.

We were told yesterday that £3.5 million in bonuses had been paid to senior officials at the UK Border Agency, including a payment of £10,000 to one individual. Does the Home Secretary agree that it is wrong to give bonuses to officials of an organisation that has been so heavily criticised, not just by the Home Affairs Committee but by Members in all parts of the House and, indeed, by the Prime Minister? May we please see an end to this bonus culture unless the UKBA is fit for purpose?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman has been vociferous in his reflections on the UK Border Agency and the UK Border Force for some time. The arrangements for bonus payments in the civil service are agreed collectively. For the 2010-11 performance year, 24% of Home Office senior civil servants were awarded non-consolidated performance payments. The highest bonus award paid to a permanent staff member of the senior civil service and its agencies was £10,000, and no UKBA civil servant was awarded a bonus of £10,000 for the 2011 performance year. Bonus payments are kept under constant review. They are awarded when individual staff have performed to strict criteria, and the restraint exercised by the current Government will continue to be exercised.

Another element of the Crime and Courts Bill is relevant to an issue raised yesterday by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) during the Prime Minister’s speech. We will introduce a new offence of driving while under the influence of drugs. Dangerous drug drivers should not be on the roads. Too many innocent people, such as 14-year-old Lillian Groves, have been killed or injured by people who have been driving under the influence of illegal drugs. We will close that loophole, and we will ensure that justice is done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

As the Home Secretary will know, we have said that the scope of the Green Paper was too wide. We recognise that there is a problem for the security agencies with regard to how civil claims are made and how material needs to be considered. However, proper safeguards need to be in place, as we have said. She also knows, as I have said this to her, that I am very willing to have further cross-party discussions with her about the detail. We have not yet seen what amendments she may have made to the Green Paper proposals and we will wait to see them and scrutinise them in detail. It is important that she should do that. On communications surveillance—I do not know whether she heard my points earlier, as she was conferring with her Front-Bench colleagues—it has been normal practice in the past for Home Secretaries to provide extensive briefing for the Opposition and the Select Committees. We will wait for that briefing and consider and scrutinise the detail as it is proposed.

The Home Secretary has also proposed stronger community sentences. That sounds good, although we gather that the Bill will be published and debated in the House of Lords without any clauses on community sentences. We should also consider what is missing. There is nothing on equal marriage—not even a draft Bill—even though, as Minister for Women and Equalities, she made it clear that she was consulting not on whether but on how to introduce the changes. There is nothing on violence against women and nothing on antisocial behaviour, even though she promised more than two years ago that new action would be taken. There is nothing on gangs, even though after the riots the Government told us that that was their big priority and even though we know that gang injunctions need to be improved. There is nothing on problem families, even though the Government told us in the autumn that they were the priority, and there is nothing to protect core public policing or to stop neighbourhood patrols being contracted out to private companies such as G4S or KBR as the cuts bite.

[Keith Vaz]

Is my right hon. Friend also surprised that there is no legislation on the criminalisation of forced marriage, something that was recommended by the Select Committee in the last Parliament and that was supported by the Prime Minister as Leader of the Opposition?

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend is certainly right that the newspapers have been briefed on that subject, but as it is not in the Queen’s Speech we do not know the Government’s position. It is obviously a complex issue; nevertheless it would be useful to know the Government’s view.

There is nothing on knife crime, crime prevention or counter-terrorism. This was the Queen’s Speech that the Government briefed as being tough on crime and tough on antisocial behaviour, but it is hardly the stuff to have criminals quaking in their boots.

To be fair to the Home Secretary, she did tell us about the National Crime Agency. We support it; it is sensible enough, it is right and there are serious national crime issues that need to be addressed, but let us be honest that this is not radical reform but mainly a rearrangement. It is a cross between the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, with the police national computer and a new command structure thrown in. It is sensible enough, it will be an improvement, but it will not compensate for the lack of 16,000 police.

As for Britain’s borders, the Home Secretary says the new National Crime Agency will include a border policing command. Will that deliver extra staff to deal with queues, extra technology to improve security checks, better management to sort out the chaos, and help for families queuing for hours with tired kids? No. Instead we will have a border command in a separate organisation from the border force, which is itself in a separate organisation from the border agency, and there will still be no clear direction from the Government about what any of the three of them is supposed to do. The Home Secretary is adding to the chaos, not solving it.

[Keith Vaz]

I am grateful to the shadow Home Secretary for giving way a second time. Has she had the opportunity to read the report by John Vine that was published this morning, in which he specifically points out his concern about constant reorganisation not helping the protection of our borders?

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend, who is the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, makes an extremely important point. I wanted to come on to that report, because, overall, we can see the queues getting longer while Ministers do not seem to have a clue what is going on.

Last Monday, the Minister for Immigration claimed the maximum queues were an hour and a half and accused the media of making “wild suggestions”. By Tuesday he was admitting the wild suggestions were nearer the truth; by Wednesday we were told the Prime Minister was getting a grip; by Thursday and Friday the queues were getting worse and worse. There were two-hour waits at Stansted and three-hour waits at Heathrow, reports of trains delayed by queues at Paris, Customs checks stopped at Heathrow and reports that staff from Manchester were being put on a plane, told to work for a few hours at Heathrow and put on another plane back again.

Finally, this week, we got the truth from the borders and immigration inspectorate. Passport staff at terminal 3 have been cut by 15%, shortages mean that they cannot cope with the queues, and management changes brought in under this Government are making things much worse. The Minister for Immigration charmingly told us that the report was out of date because action had been taken since September to sort it out, but since September things have got worse, not better. The report says the staff are all on at the wrong times—more when the airport is quiet and fewer when all the planes are coming in.

It is just baffling to everyone that the UK Border Force and the Minister for Immigration do not seem to be able to work out what time of day it is, but at least they are doing better than the Home Secretary, who is still rather challenged by the day of the week. I know that the Home Secretary is not on Twitter and she might have missed the attempts to cheer her up through the difficult time that she is having. They have started to suggest songs, such as “ Sunday, Wednesday, happy days,” “I don’t know why I don’t like Tuesdays,” “Eight days a week” and—clearly—nothing by The Police. How about Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Not leaving on a jet plane and I don’t know when I’ll be back again”?

Getting the date wrong in a case such as Abu Qatada’s, however, could have been very serious. Everyone is very relieved that the European Court decided to reject Abu Qatada’s appeal not because of the date, but because of the merits of the case. We should all welcome that decision. We all want him deported as soon as possible and the case has been repeatedly and thoroughly considered at every level in the courts, but lessons also have to be learned at the Home Office too. Three weeks ago the Home Secretary came to the House and was adamant that she had got the date right. Twelve times she told the House the deadline was Monday. In scathing tones she said to me:

“We are talking about a simple mathematical question.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2012; Vol. 543, c. 509.]

Sadly, it was a mathematical question that neither the Home Secretary nor her Ministers seemed able to answer.

The Court was very clear in its judgment that the deadline was Tuesday and Court officials said so at the time. It is no good the Home Secretary’s saying that the Foreign Office is now complaining that the Court’s guidance was not clear enough. If it was not clear enough, why not ask questions at the time? Why did they not ring up the Court and ask the question? Why did they not listen to the media and to the others who were raising with her the point that the Court was saying very clearly that the date was Tuesday, instead? Why take the risk?

--- Later in debate ---

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

It would have been possible to discuss many aspects of the failure of the Queen’s Speech to address the needs of the country. The fact that 1 million young people are out of work ought to have been one of the priorities addressed by the Prime Minister in the Gracious Speech, but it was not there. That is relevant to our debate on home affairs, because we know that as unemployment rises among young people, some are drawn into criminality and some feel abandoned by society. That affects how some young people—not all—relate to the rest of society. There is a direct impact when we fail to look at growth and creating an employment base for our young people.

We could have looked at the failure of the Queen’s Speech to address funding of the national health service. Every time there are cuts in the health service, there are cutbacks in mental health services and there is a direct impact on the criminal justice system. Crime rates go up when we do not deal properly with mental illness in our society. Discussion of both those issues would have been relevant today, but as the Home Secretary is with us, I shall devote the bulk of my remarks to her responsibilities in the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

First, however, I cannot resist responding to the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy). He hopes that his friends on the Labour Benches, where many of us regard him highly, do not make mischief simply to cause confusion in the coalition. I have to tell him that the confusion is already embedded deep in the coalition parties; it is nothing to do with us. Of course, it is impossible to defend the House of Lords as is, but he and his colleagues must address the fact that before we get to the important question of how we move people into a second Chamber, reform must be defined by the function and nature of the relationship between the two Houses.

I believe we should have either no second Chamber or an elected one, but we should also make sure that there is a proper relationship between the two Houses. It is not a trivial question. If it is not addressed, the Bill we think is coming before us will not be adequate for the modern constitution our nation needs.

I turn to the Home Secretary’s direct responsibilities. She was asked on a number of occasions why she did not address the fact that more than 16,000 people are demonstrating outside this building. They include police officers, many from the conurbation of Greater Manchester —my area—who are very concerned about three issues that affect policing. Of course, there are some matters of self-interest. Police officers are concerned about their pensions. I talked to one officer who has served for 12 years. He signed on in the belief that he would get his pension after 30 years’ service. He was perfectly entitled to believe that his contract would be maintained, but now he fears that instead of serving 18 years, he will be asked to serve 28 years before he can take his pension. Those are the legitimate grievances of people we should respect for the work they do.

The police feel that the Winsor report was adopted mechanically with no proper consideration of what the reform agenda could and should have been. The Home Secretary had the opportunity to lead a debate about modern policing, but instead she simply delegated the responsibility to Tom Winsor. His report could have formed the basis for the debate, but it was not fit for implementation lock, stock and barrel, and the police are right to be concerned about that.

The police are also concerned about what is happening to policing in our communities, despite what the Home Secretary tells us consistently. When I have pointed out to her that even though Greater Manchester is not a low crime area, police cutbacks pro rata are greater than in any force in England and Wales, she dismisses it by saying that the chief constable does not agree with my view that the cuts will have an impact on policing. She might have heard the chief constable of Greater Manchester police on the radio this morning talking about the difficult challenges in policing. He talked about the increased demands on the police—in relation to mental health, for example, which we know is increasingly an issue in conurbations such as mine. We know that these issues are piling extra pressures on the police while these cuts are taking place—1,500 police officers and 1,500 civilian staff are to go from the Greater Manchester police force. Despite Government rhetoric, that simply cannot be done without a direct impact on front-line policing.

I could say dramatically, had these cuts already been fully functioning at the time of the riots last August, it would have been massively more difficult to assemble the concentration of police officers that we were able to in Greater Manchester—police officers who literally put their lives on the line, out of an enormous sense of duty to our society. They were not asking questions about pensions, they were not asking questions about reform, but were prepared to stand up to rioters because they knew that that was what society expected of them. If we cut those police officer numbers, we cut the capacity to deal with such emergencies.

[Keith Vaz]

It is those extraordinary events that take so much of the police resources. My hon. Friend and I were present at the memorial service for Anuj Bidvi, the student who was murdered on Boxing day. It took a huge amount of Greater Manchester police’s time to catch his killer, and that was not written into any budget. Those were circumstances of the sort that occur outside budgets.

[Tony Lloyd]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who has enormous experience and is enormously well respected throughout the world of criminal justice. He is absolutely right. That brings me to a point that I want to make. The Home Secretary and her colleagues have wanted to peddle the myth that it is easy to define what is front-line policing and what is not. Further to the case to which my right hon. Friend refers, of course an enormous number of back-room staff are involved in solving a murder. It is reckoned that, in Greater Manchester, a shooting costs somewhere in the order of £1 million to solve. That is not £1 million of blue-uniformed police officers plodding the streets, picking up bullets and rescuing people; it is £1 million spent on a resource base that is necessary to solve that type of most serious crime.

Fortunately, in Greater Manchester the number of shootings has gone down significantly in recent years because of the good partnership work that the police have been able to do; but that partnership work is challenged by the cuts. There is, I must say to the Home Secretary, too much denial among Government Members of the real impact of the policing cuts, too much denial of the fact that those cuts are reducing policing capacity, too much denial of the fact that there is an impact on the morale of the police officers who serve our communities, and who are now at the point where they feel they are being taken for granted and treated very badly in this process.

It is easy for any politician to stand up and defend the police, especially when we are in opposition, and I understand the dangers of that. The police do need reform. The police themselves accept that there is a great need for reform. But that reform must be consistent with the challenges they face, and with ensuring that the process of change is not so rapid that we prevent the process of embedding the necessary changes. I think there is now a need for a pause in the pace of change, although I do not expect one. I hope the Home Secretary will listen to those who are advising her away from that direction of travel, because we do need to look at what modern policing demands. We do need to look at partnership working of the type that modern policing has so successfully cultivated in recent years, which has allowed policing to operate within our neighbourhoods and to become part of the community, but which has also allowed it to operate at the most sophisticated level of modern technology, to solve the type of gun crime that I mentioned, or to be involved in the combating of terrorism and all the things that require a very different type of sophistication. But all that requires a more secure resource base.

When the Home Secretary was talking about the National Crime Agency, she did not answer my specific question about its resourcing and the number of people working there. The concern has been raised with me that there would be fewer people transferring across to the NCA than there are at present in the National Policing Improvement Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency combined, but with an expectation that more duties would be placed on the NCA. If that is right, we need to know how those extra efficiencies will be generated, or in any case we need some indication. I may well be wrong, and if the Home Secretary wants to tell the House now or later that I am wrong, I will hold up my hands and accept that. But it really is important that we get this right, because the NCA’s task will be of such fundamental importance that we must have the proper resource base. We must know that that resource base is sufficient to enable the continuation of the work that has in the past been done by SOCA and the NPIA, to enable the NCA to play a significant part in the future of policing.

I conclude as I began. There are many things we could have discussed in the Queen’s Speech that will impact directly on the levels of crime and security in our communities. It could have been mental health or issues around unemployment, especially among our young people. There is enough lacking in what the Home Secretary said today about the future of policing to cause concern, in communities such as mine and up and down this country of ours. I hope she will go back and fight a stronger case with the Chancellor—a stronger case that says, “Of all the things that you can cut back on, people’s security should be amongst the last.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster), who in this home affairs debate has rightly raised the important subject of children, families and adoption. Before I was elected to this place, I was a child care solicitor in local government, so I recognise the importance of a number of the points he made about the bureaucracy surrounding adoption and the need to make sure that children are placed for adoption. I hope that those points will be considered during the Bill’s passage through this House, and that its journey will be a speedy one.

I welcome the proposed legislation on drug driving to put it on a par with drink driving. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) and the Croydon Advertiser, who have led the campaign for a number of months. Having looked at the legislation and learnt about the campaign that the hon. Gentleman has prosecuted since becoming a Member of this House, I think the proposal seems so sensible that one wonders why we did not act before now. The only problem, I think, was that the equipment was not sufficient to allow the police to test drivers who may have taken drugs. I am sure that when the hon. Gentleman catches your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, he will say more about the proposed legislation.

I also welcome the Government’s commitment to changing the landscape of policing and the creation of the National Crime Agency. As the shadow Home Secretary said, it is a good concept to put organisations together and focus their efforts. The Prime Minister went further in his speech yesterday when he spoke about creating an FBI for the United Kingdom. I am not sure whether the Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice see the NCA in the same light, or whether the right hon. Gentleman will become the new J Edgar Hoover, but the fact is that we need to unclutter the landscape of policing and make sure that it does the job we want it to do.

I am not sure that, at the end of the reorganisation, we will have fewer organisations than when the process started, but it is sensible to place the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre within the National Crime Agency. I was concerned when that was suggested, and in the light of the recent controversies about the grooming of young girls, CEOP’s importance has come to the fore, but I was convinced by other members of the Home Affairs Committee and we agreed unanimously that it is sensible to put CEOP in the NCA, as long as it retains its identity and focus and is not submerged in some great bureaucracy.

The problem that I have with the National Crime Agency is that we have so few details. I remember the appearance of the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice before the Select Committee. He asked me in advance whether he could bring his director of finance to the Committee sitting, so the director of finance came along and sat with him. I asked the director of finance what the NCA’s budget was, and he could not give the Committee an answer. It was at that stage that we became very worried about how the details of the NCA would be arrived at, so every month—I do not know whether the Minister knows this—the Committee sends to the only employee, as far as I know, of the National Crime Agency, Keith Bristow. He must be a very lonely man in this huge organisation, which the Prime Minister likened to the FBI, and which is to have many organisations going into it. It has only one full-time employee, as I understand it. We sent him a questionnaire, so that he can fill in the gaps, and so that the jigsaw or new landscape can hopefully be completed by vesting day—the crucial day, of course, on which the NCA will get all its powers.

We will watch the NCA very carefully. We will watch the way in which the Serious Organised Crime Agency is merged with it, and will monitor the number of people leaving SOCA. We will follow the deliberations of the Public Accounts Committee, which had a very good sitting in which it discovered that hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money were being paid to former employees of SOCA who decided to take early retirement rather than stay in the police service. We will monitor those former employees to see whether they come back as consultants. If they decide to advise the Sultan of Brunei or the King of Bahrain, as some of our senior officers have done, that is a matter for them, but if they come back as consultants, having been paid off by the taxpayer, the Home Affairs Committee and the Public Accounts Committee will have something to say about it.

I share the Government’s ambition for a new landscape, but it is important to have people in that landscape. The crucial people to have, when dealing with policing, are police officers. Like the shadow Home Secretary, I went to talk to some police officers—mostly those who had come from Leicestershire, but also a few others including Paul McKeever, the chairman of the Police Federation—about their march in Westminster today. I am sorry that the commissioner did not allow them to march past the Palace of Westminster, and I am sorry that certain chief constables did not allow officers leave to join the march—I understand that police leave was cancelled in some, if not all, areas—because it is really important that we hear what the police have to say about the Winsor review.

If the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice and others have followed the proceedings of the Home Affairs Committee, they will know that we were not that impressed by Mr Winsor, partly because he decided to criticise the Select Committee, which obviously does not go down well with its members, and also because we felt that his data and the claims that he made were not really backed up with facts.

[Nick Herbert]

indicated dissent.

[Keith Vaz]

The Minister shakes his head, but I urge him to look at the exchanges between members of the Committee and Mr Winsor.

[Alun Michael]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Does he acknowledge that at one point Mr Winsor said he had given a definition of front-line policing in his earlier report, although there is not, in fact, anything like an adequate definition there of what he means by front-line policing, never mind a definition that could practically be used, if we are to use that term?

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

My right hon. Friend is right: Mr Winsor did not give a definition, and it would have been useful to receive one. I know that the Minister has written to the Committee with his definition of what front-line policing should be.

We have to carry police officers with us. I cannot really understand why a Government committed to law and order with the kind of vision and ambition that Ministers have should want to take on the very people who are to administer that vision. The last time I was on a demonstration with the police was under the previous Government, who made the terrible error of not paying police officers what the arbitration committee said they should. In the only robust conversation—I was going to say “row”—that I had with the previous Prime Minister on the subject, I pointed out that a Labour Government ought to honour an agreement that they had made, and should pay police officers what we said we would. I think 100,000 officers turned up to that demonstration. There are slightly fewer this time—28,000—but, as I have said, their leave has been cancelled.

The Government should not take on the very people who are to administer a crucial part of their agenda, because if anything goes wrong, and there is an emergency, the first people praised by the Home Secretary at the Dispatch Box are the police.

[Nick Herbert]

I am listening carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman is saying, as he knows. May I point out that the Government honoured the third year of that pay deal? That is one of the first things we did when we came to office. Will he reflect on the fact that the recommendations of the independent Winsor review, which was advised by a former senior chief constable, have been broadly supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers, which represents the 43 forces of England and Wales? The recommendations are now the subject of negotiation. It is not right to dismiss a considered, independent report that is broadly supported by the chief constables of this country.

[Keith Vaz]

It depends which chief constable we are talking about; I do not think that the chief constable of Gloucestershire, who recently announced that he is going, is the best person to call in the Minister’s defence. This is about ordinary police officers, not those who sit at the top of the tree. Very soon, ACPO will no longer be there, because the Minister is getting rid of it. He may pray it in aid, but we are talking about the effect on ordinary police officers. I do not want ordinary police officers to have to take second jobs to make ends meet. I do not want them to spend some of their time as private investigators, as some of them do. I do not want them to have to leave the police force to become private investigators; 60% of private investigators are former police officers. I want police officers to have a career, be well paid, and be compensated.

I endorse the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) about the way in which SOCA operates internationally. What it does internationally is different from what it does in this country. Ever since I have chaired the Select Committee, I have felt that if the public give an organisation £500 million, we expect it to be able to deliver as far as seizures and disrupting organised crime are concerned. I never thought SOCA quite made it, in terms of giving the public value for money. However, on our recent visit to Colombia, I was deeply impressed by what SOCA does abroad. I know that it is to go into the NCA, but given that the President of Colombia, in a meeting with the Select Committee, spent the entire time praising the work of SOCA and what it is doing to stop drugs coming out of Colombia, we should consider branding for one moment, and whether we actually want to change SOCA’s name abroad, or keep it, just for these purposes. Many countries rate what SOCA is doing, and to give it a new name and branding may be a step too far.

I will not deal with surveillance issues because I know that the Chairman of the Select Committee on Justice will speak on the subject, but I will talk about two more issues. One is immigration. The Government will deeply regret their decision to take away the right of appeal for family visits. I am looking round the Chamber. The hon. Members for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod), for Croydon Central and for Harrow East (Bob Blackman)—I am sure that there are others, but I pick those because I know a bit about their constituencies —will have huge immigration case loads in their surgeries, as many Labour Members have. The fact is that taking away the right of appeal will hugely increase Members’ case loads. We are happy to do more work, but the fact is that we will send those people back to make further applications. The Minister for Immigration is not in the Chamber at the moment and other Ministers do not deal with immigration work, but the facts are very clear: 50% of the appeals against decisions to refuse family visits are won in the immigration tribunal, which means that decision making is not as good as it should be. If we take away the right of appeal, we will take away people’s only option to have their relatives come here to attend family occasions, funerals and weddings.

That will be a big mistake by the Government. The previous Government were about to make the same mistake. I think that the proposal comes not from Ministers but from officials. I can recall talking with Charles Clarke about it—he happened to be watching a Norwich match at the time—when colleagues and I went to see him, and he took our point. I said, “Take away the right of appeal, and you will deny our citizens, people who live in this country, the chance to get their relatives here for their family occasions.”

The Government will regret what they are doing. The Prime Minister addressed 1,000 people at the launch of Conservative Friends of India 10 days ago. I am glad that he did so—he made a very good speech—but he did not tell them about this proposal. Every single person attending that event will have a relative who wishes to come here to visit them and so will be inconvenienced by and feel distressed about what is proposed. We are putting pressure on the entry clearance officers, who themselves are having their numbers cut because of Government decisions. I ask Ministers please to look at this again. It is extremely important that they do so.

The shadow Home Secretary spoke about Abu Qatada. The Home Secretary came out and said that a mistake was made—not in so many words, but she said that the date was wrong. She came to the House and was asked 12 times about it, and she came to the Home Affairs Committee and was asked by me six times about it. She said that she accepted unequivocal legal advice, so she should change her legal advisers. She has spent £1 million on external legal advisers on the Abu Qatada case. It is not as though there is an absence of Queen’s counsel; they are not all at the Leveson inquiry. My advice is to find someone else who knows about immigration law and pay them what they ask to be paid, but for goodness sake get some good legal advice. I do not blame Ministers for the mistake, and I do not expect the Home Secretary to pick up a phone and find out when a deadline is, but I do expect her to get that legal advice, and if someone says they think it is wrong, even if it happens to be a BBC journalist, she should call her officials together and ask them to look at it again.

My final point is not about home affairs but about an issue I have raised in nearly every Queen’s Speech debate in the 25 years I have been a Member of the House. It is something that happened 21 years ago—the closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. In every Gracious Speech debate I have talked about the need to end the liquidation of BCCI. On 5 July 1991 the sixth-biggest bank in the world was closed down. Many of my constituents lost money in that bank, and I can remember going to see the then Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England with people such as the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and Mr Alex Salmond and many others to see what money there was for the people who had lost their money in BCCI. We were told that there would be no money left for them because the bank was empty and bankrupt. The Sheikh of Abu Dhabi was told, “Please don’t give us the money, because the bank is broke.”

After 21 years, those people have now received 90% of their money back, thanks to the work of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was the first and only Secretary of State in 21 years to write directly to the liquidators to ask when the liquidation would be completed. I am pleased to say that shortly afterwards the liquidators fixed the final meeting, and on 17 May, after 21 years and £1 billion of liquidators’ fees for a £6 billion bank, BCCI will finally close and the creditors will have got 90% of their money back. This is the last time I shall mention BCCI in this House, certainly in a home affairs debate. I wish all those who have been involved in the campaign well and hope that we will learn the lessons from it: when a bank is in trouble and people are prepared to support it, as we have done subsequently with a number of other banks, we should stop and pause before closing it down and causing misery for so many thousands of people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

Will the Minister and the Home Secretary, who is also present, receive a delegation of Members of this House with an interest in these issues? I think a deal can be struck that will be fair to our constituents and that will help the appeal process. We want to look at the quality of the decision making as well as the appeal process. If the Minister is prepared to do that, and if the Home Secretary, through the Minister for Immigration, is prepared to meet the Chair of the Justice Committee, myself and others who have an interest in these issues, I think we can come to a compromise that is acceptable to all sides.

[Mr Djanogly]

Yes—[Interruption.] The Home Secretary has just advised me that the Immigration Minister would be delighted to meet the right hon. Gentleman and discuss this issue in the detail it deserves.

A number of Members raised the issue of broadcasting court proceedings. I would characterise the various contributions as having given a general—but, in some cases at least, a cautious—welcome to the Government’s proposals. The Government are committed to improving transparency and public understanding of the court system, and allowing broadcasting from courts will contribute to that. Of course, the filming and broadcasting of judicial proceedings must be carefully and sensitively undertaken, and I can assure Members that there will be no filming of victims, witnesses, defendants or jurors. There will of course be restrictions on the use of footage to ensure that it is only used sensitively and for informational purposes.

The hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) and my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) spoke strongly in support of our drug-driving proposals. I can tell my hon. Friend that we are working to ensure that the necessary “type approval tests” for devices to be used in police stations are completed without delay.

The Government’s proposals to reform civil proceedings to enable the courts to take better account of sensitive material and prevent damaging disclosure of intelligence material have been of great interest to the House and the public, and we have had many valuable contributions on that. The Government are committed to ensuring that we can reassure our allies that the confidential basis on which they share intelligence with us can be protected, while ensuring that the courts are able to make real findings on the merits of cases where sensitive information is given. I think the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David) said that he is opposed to closed courts. Let me say to him—[Interruption.] If he would like to make his position clear, I am happy to give way.

Immigration Queues (UK Airports)

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): I think that that is most fair. Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting the urgent question.

To ask the Minister for Immigration if he will make a statement on the immigration delays at UK airports.

[The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)]

The Government’s priority is the security of the UK border. The right checks need to be carried out to control immigration, protect against terrorism and tackle crime. We maintain thorough border checks. Despite those robust checks, the vast majority of passengers pass through immigration control quickly.

Let me give the House the actual figures. Between January and March, the average waiting times across the UK were six minutes for UK and EU passengers, and 25 minutes for non-EU passengers. The latest internal management information shows that, in the first two weeks of April, 99% of UK and EU passengers queued for less than 25 minutes and 96% of non-EU passengers queued for less than 45 minutes.

At Heathrow, the information shows that those target times were met every day throughout that period for UK and EU passengers, and on 11 out of 15 days for non-EU passengers. Over the weekend, there were some breaches of acceptable waiting times at Heathrow. That was caused mainly by the severe weather, leading to flight diversions and changing flight schedules, and the bunching of arrivals.

However, I stress to the House that our information shows that queuing times bore no resemblance to some of the wilder suggestions. Border Force data show that the longest queuing time for immigration control was one and a half hours on Friday night at terminal 5 for non-EU nationals, and times for UK and EU nationals were significantly lower.

These times are too long. Passengers demand an efficient service and the British public demand tough border controls. We need both. That is why we are establishing a new central control room for the UK Border Force at Heathrow; why we are putting in place mobile teams that can be deployed rapidly across the airport to deal with pressures; and why within weeks we will be implementing new rostering and shift patterns, which will provide additional flexibility, so staff can be deployed individually to meet unexpected surges in passenger flows. We are also working with airport operators and airlines to ensure they provide more accurate passenger manifests and flight schedules to help the UK Border Force to deploy staff at the right time, in the right place, to meet demand.

On top of those permanent improvements, as passenger numbers increase in the run-up to the Olympics, the UK Border Force will increase its staffing at ports and airports. The important factor is to have staff flexibly deployed in the right numbers, at the right times. That is what we are doing. The UK Border Force will ensure that all immigration desks at Heathrow and other key ports and airports in the south-east are fully staffed during peak periods over the summer. A contingency force of appropriately trained staff will be sent to the border to provide extra help to ensure passengers are processed as quickly as possible.

Border security is Britain’s first line of defence—it must not and will not be compromised—but our border force is also the first impression presented to overseas visitors and those returning home. Therefore, while we maintain the right levels of security checks, we will always seek to improve performance. That is what I—and UK Border Force—are focused on doing. This country needs a secure and efficient border, and this Government will deliver it.

[Keith Vaz]

I thank the Minister for his response and for acknowledging that there have been delays at Heathrow airport. As he knows, there is considerable concern about the length of waiting times in immigration halls at our airports at peak times. Of course, we must ensure that proper security checks are carried out—we do not want a repetition of the case of Sheikh Raed Salah, who was banned by the Home Secretary but able to enter Heathrow airport—but the queues have sometimes been in excess of two hours and they are and have been a serious embarrassment.

The Home Secretary made a decision in the aftermath of the Brodie Clark saga to suspend all risk-based checks. Given that, why are border desks not fully staffed at peak periods and why are electronic gates, including iris scanners, so often broken? The Home Secretary has appointed Brian Moore as the temporary seconded head of the UK Border Force, and his post has been advertised. How many times has Mr Moore visited terminal 5 at peak times?

Will the Minister confirm reports that BAA has been asked to refrain from handing out leaflets to passengers that apologise for the very long delays and advise them how to complain about them? Does he accept that hundreds of people in the arrival hall after 12-hour flights will be extremely frustrated and angry at having to queue for two hours at unattended border desks and at using—or trying to use—broken iris scanners? Does that situation not pose a public order risk?

As the Minister knows, over the weekend, the British Air Transport Association, border staff and BAA have all called for urgent action. I acknowledge what he has said today about what he intends to do, but it is important for him to hold a meeting with all those affected—all the stakeholders—and if necessary to hold it at Heathrow airport.

The UK Border Force is re-hiring former border officers to help with the Olympics. However, excessive delays in our immigration halls are not only an Olympic issue; they affect travellers today. What further action does the Minister propose to take to ensure that the reputation of Heathrow as a world-class airport and a premier international tourist destination is not damaged?

In my view, the Minister has a choice. He either hires more staff or looks again at the risk-based policy, which the Home Secretary has said she is open-minded about. The third option, which is to do nothing, is simply not acceptable.

[Damian Green]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his question. I hope I reassured him in my opening response that doing nothing is precisely what we are not doing. We are doing quite a lot, as I will detail a little more in a moment.

The right hon. Gentleman asked some specific questions. In the few weeks he has been in charge of Border Force, Brian Moore has visited Heathrow twice, including over Easter—one of the peak busiest times of the year—to see precisely how Border Force coped over that difficult and challenging period. The answer was that, despite the predictions we had that Easter would mean gridlock at Heathrow, actually it did not. Heathrow coped well over Easter.

The right hon. Gentleman also asked about e-gates and iris recognition immigration system gates. The IRIS gates commissioned by the previous Government are being phased out because they have come to the end of their technological life. They are less reliable than the e-gates that we are replacing them with and which provide a much better passenger experience.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about risk-based controls. As he knows, I have said—as has the Home Secretary in front of the Home Affairs Committee—that the principle of risk-based controls is a sound one to explore, but he will know that, as the John Vine report showed, what we had, when we thought we had risk-based controls, actually were not risk-based controls. Information had been withheld from successive Ministers over the previous five years.

The right hon. Gentleman asked, quite reasonably, what we have done. I have mentioned some of the actions we have already taken. We have rebalanced staff across Heathrow’s terminals; we are opening the new control room to allow us to monitor and deal with demand across the airports, so Border Force staff will not be stuck in terminals, as they used to be; we have completed our recruitment to mobile teams that can deal with unexpected surges; and we are encouraging all eligible passengers to use the e-passport gates, and are now getting close to 50% of those eligible to use them doing so, which significantly improves the flow-through, particularly for UK citizens.

We have, as a result, freed up more experienced staff from those e-passport gates to man the non-EU desks and to help reduce queues there. We are cross-training more and more of our staff so that they can work flexibly across all areas of border control. So very significant steps have been taken in the past few months to make the airports work more efficiently, and I am sure that passengers and the House will see the effects of that in the coming months.

Stephen Lawrence

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s last comment: racism has no part and no place in the policing of our country. I pay tribute to the important steps that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has taken in underlining that message and to some of the actions that he is already taking to ensure that that message on policing in London is sent out loud and clear, including the introduction of CCTV cameras into some vehicles to provide greater transparency and accountability. These are issues that the Home Secretary is taking into careful consideration. As I said, she wishes the response of the current corruption investigations conducted by the Metropolitan police to be reported to her; she will then be able to determine the appropriate next steps in that regard.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The Minister has confirmed the evidence given by the Home Secretary to the Select Committee on Home Affairs this morning on this very point. Doreen Lawrence has written to me and other members of the Committee about the issue of an inquiry. What concerns me is the fact that the inquiry conducted by the Metropolitan police is an internal one. In order to satisfy the public and all those Members who have been aware of this issue over a long period, would it not be better if this were conducted not by an external force, but by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, so that the Lawrence family can feel that a proper look has been taken before the issue of a public inquiry can be decided on?

[James Brokenshire]

The appropriate course of action is for the Metropolitan police to conclude its current investigations appropriately, but as speedily as is practicable. Following the receipt of that report, the Home Secretary will determine what further action may be appropriate to give necessary reassurance about the process to the family and to the community. My right hon. Friend will then consider whether a public inquiry is or is not appropriate in the light of the responses she receives from the Metropolitan police.

Abu Qatada

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend is right to bring us back to the core issue at stake. The fact is that, for the past 11 years, this country has been trying to deport Abu Qatada to Jordan. As far as I, the Government, the British public and, I hope, the whole House are concerned, that is what should happen to him. On Tuesday, when the Government had their first opportunity to take action to resume that deportation, that is exactly what we did.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

Nobody doubts the efforts that the Home Secretary has made on this issue. I think that, if she had half a chance, she would like to be handcuffed to Abu Qatada on a plane to Jordan in order to deposit him in Amman. What concerns me, however, is the fact that a north London firm of legal aid solicitors has been able to outwit the very expensive silks of the Home Office. She mentioned article 43. If she looks at the cases of Praha v. the Czech Republic and Otto v. Germany, she will see that the time limit begins the next day. I am also worried about the 15 other cases that she referred to on Tuesday. Will she look at those cases and ensure that proper legal advice has been taken and that deadlines have been met? When she comes before the Select Committee next Tuesday, it would be good if she could give us the answers to those questions.

[Mrs May]

I repeat to the right hon. Gentleman what I said in response to an earlier question. The arbiters of whether a request for a referral put in by Abu Qatada should be accepted—whether in response to a deadline or, as we believe, outside the deadline—or whether discretion should be applied to accept it outside the deadline are not a north London firm of lawyers but the five judges who will be sitting on the panel of the Grand Chamber of the European Court.