Immigration Bill

Debate between Keith Vaz and Jake Berry

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jake Berry]

The right hon. Gentleman may not be aware of the case of Amy Houston, a girl from my constituency who was killed by an asylum seeker. He made appeal after appeal after appeal. Owing to the length of time that those appeals took, he was able to establish the right to a family life by fathering two children in this country. He killed that young girl with a motor vehicle, and he is not the sort of person we want to welcome into Britain. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we need these reforms to stop such cases in the future?

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. After 26 years as an MP, I get frustrated when people come to my surgeries on Friday evenings and say, “We want to stay longer.” I feel they have no right to stay, but I am not an immigration officer and do not know the history of their case. Multiple appeals do not help, but the solution is a quick and robust decision. We must tell people, in a timely way, whether they have a right to remain in this country, and if they do not, they ought to leave. That is when the enforcement process should begin and end, not 10 years after someone makes an asylum application, when they have established a family. It is very difficult to tell people to go back, when faced with a loving family and children looking into your eyes who do not want to go to a country they know nothing about. It is the failure of the system that creates such misery, and that is what we need to end.

Finally, I wish to make two quick points. First, the Minister is due to appear before the Select Committee shortly—I will not give him the date now, because he is deep in conversation with the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker)—and when he comes, we will want real, practical dates for the introduction of the e-Borders programme. As I have said, the Minister listens to the House’s concerns and is prepared to act accordingly, but in my view it is not acceptable that three and a half years after the e-Borders contract was cancelled we still do not have tendering.

In case my right hon. and hon. Friends think that that is all the Government’s fault, I must say, I am afraid, that the previous Government’s handling of the e-Borders project was lamentable. It is an absolute disgrace that anyone should sign a contract for an e-Borders programme worth £750 million and not tell the company what they expect and when they expect it. That is why we have an arbitration process that has been going on for two and a half years and which will cost the British taxpayer millions of pounds. This is a lesson not just for a future Labour Government, but for the present Government. When they sign procurement contracts, they must have benchmarks.

I say to the Minister, however, that we do not have to wait until 2015; we can have exit checks now. He has not written back to me since his last appearance before the Select Committee, when I asked him to confirm that there were no exit checks on departure. [Interruption.] No, the Minister has not. Mr Speaker, when you or I leave the country, the airline has a lot of information on us: it knows how we booked our ticket, sometimes which hotels we are staying in, whom we are travelling with, which seat we are on—we can book our own seats—and so on. When we leave at Heathrow airport, they look at our boarding cards, but they do not check our passports. It would be easy to introduce these checks now, and it would be a big win for the Government —much better than ad vans. They could place immigration officers at departure gates—it would not create any queues—to check people’s passports as well as boarding cards. They would then know who was going in and out. It is not as brilliant as an e-Borders programme, but it would be the first stage of knowing who has left the country. I hope the Minister will give special attention to that point.

Finally, on the administration of the Home Office, I give full credit to the Home Secretary for abolishing the UK Border Agency, but it will only have been worth abolishing if we get something better. Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to get answers from senior Home Office officials to simple Select Committee questions about the number of people with the right to remain in the country and the number of people who have applied for further leave to remain. In the end, I got the answers half an hour ago, after I said that I would come to the Chamber and name the officials who had not replied to my letter. I do not want, as the Chairman of a Select Committee, to have to do that, but when people write to Ministers and officials, they need a reply. That goes not only for Select Committee members, but for members of the public; members of the public want timely replies.

New legislation will work only if the Minister and the Home Secretary improve the administration of the Home Office on immigration and visas issues. The Home Secretary abolished the UKBA because she said it was closed, secretive and defensive. If at the end of the year we are having exactly the same problems with the same officials in the same jobs, answerable to the same line managers, which is what they were told would be the case, we will be disappointed. At the moment, their administrative changes have a fair wind, but we will want to see a real difference in how immigration policy is not just agreed by the House, but implemented after it becomes legislation.