Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Mark Harper and Harriett Baldwin(11 years ago)
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Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
8. What steps she is taking to reduce illegal immigrants’ access to housing.
The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)
The Immigration Bill will require private landlords to make some simple, straightforward checks so that illegal migrants do not have access to private housing. Existing legislation already makes it clear that illegal migrants do not have access to social housing.
Harriett Baldwin
Farmers in my constituency offer temporary housing to the seasonal agricultural workers who pick the delicious crops we grow in West Worcestershire. Will it be the farmers or the gangmasters who are required to verify their immigration status?
Mr Harper
If employers make available tied accommodation —meaning it is tied to their employment—they will not have to make further checks, because, as employers, they already have to check someone’s right to work in the United Kingdom, and we do not want to overburden them with bureaucracy.
Citizenship (Armed Forces) Bill
Debate between Mark Harper and Harriett Baldwin(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Harriett Baldwin
The question is whether those troops settled in Gibraltar and what the rules were for their naturalisation as British citizens prior to 1981. I can honestly say that I do not have the faintest clue, but that is an interesting historical point.
I was evacuated to the British sovereign base of Dhekelia as a child when, as a British citizen, I was growing up in Cyprus. We were living in Nicosia at the time, and we were often under threat of invasion by Turkish forces. I remember being evacuated to Dhekelia, and feeling incredibly safe and secure there, on British sovereign territory. My father, however, had to remain behind in Nicosia to do his job. He put a Union flag on the roof of our house, and we sincerely hoped that the Turkish air force would be able to spot it from the air should it decide to bomb Nicosia. However, I digress, Mr Speaker.
I am trying to find out how my hypothetical examples would be affected by the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Woking told us that the provision would probably apply to a citizen of Fiji. Let us imagine that that citizen of Fiji joins Her Majesty’s armed forces, does exemplary service and decides—I do not know what the residence requirements would be—that he or she wants to remain in the British Indian Ocean Territory. Does the territorial extent of the Bill mean that the first date of the five-year period includes residence in one of the territories I have listed? That is my interpretation.
In relation to the questions asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough, a situation might arise in which, as we heard, a Jamaican citizen who joined our armed forces abroad and served with great courage with them in other parts of the world decides to settle in Gibraltar, or perhaps closer to Jamaica, in the Cayman Islands. From there, could that person apply for naturalisation as a British citizen, without ever having resided in what we might more naturally think of as the United Kingdom? I particularly want clarification on that point. I understand that the 1981 Act requires people to spend five years resident in the UK, but does the territorial extent in the Bill define the UK more widely? I look forward to hearing from the Minister about that.
The first residence requirement in the 1981 Act is that applicants must have been resident in the UK for at least five years, and I am again interested in the Minister clarifying the territorial extent of the United Kingdom in that regard. The second requirement is that they must have been present in the United Kingdom five years before the date of application, which is the provision that we are tackling; the third is that they are free of immigration time restrictions on the date of application; and the fourth is that they are free of immigration restrictions for a period of 12 months before making the application. Will that remain in force when the Bill is passed?
The fifth requirement is that the applicants have not spent more than 450 days outside the United Kingdom during the five-year period. I understand that that is covered by the Secretary of State’s discretion with regards to serving members of the armed forces. The sixth is that they have not spent more than 90 days outside the United Kingdom in the last 12 months of the five-year period. The final requirement is that they have not been in breach of the immigration rules at any stage during the five-year period. Can the Minister confirm that all those aspects of the residency requirements in the 1981 Act will continue to apply, and that the Bill will change only one particular area?
Since the 1981 Act, there has been one major modification to what it takes for someone to be naturalised as a citizen of the United Kingdom. I refer, of course, to the UK citizenship test. I do not know whether you have ever had the chance to see whether you can pass it, Mr Speaker, but in preparation for this debate, I thought that I would see whether I could do so. I looked at some sample tests, and I regret to inform the House that in the first sample test I failed to reach the necessary 75% required to pass.
Let me give some examples of questions that I did not answer successfully. I will not put you on the spot, Mr Speaker, although I know you are an encyclopaedically knowledgeable man. The following question stumped me: in which year did married women get the right to divorce their husband? To help the applicant there are four possible answers, and I am happy to take an intervention from anyone who can answer the question correctly. The options are 1837, 1857, 1875 or 1882. I do not know the correct answer, but I know I got it wrong. I am glad to say that I did know that it is not the Prime Minister who calls a by-election and that we have two Chambers in our national Parliament, so I sailed through some of the questions.
Here is another question that I failed miserably to pass: what is the number of children and young people up to the age of 19 in the UK? Again, Mr Speaker, I will help you out, but I will not put you on the spot. I will take interventions from colleagues who know the answer. The four possible answers are 13 million, 14 million, 15 million and 16 million. I failed on that one and I can see that the House has also failed on that measure of citizenship. I was getting rather depressed with my results from the test until I discovered a crucial fact. I compliment my hon. Friend the Minister on any involvement that he may have had in this crucial fact, which is that this Government have now introduced a much more sensible citizenship test. Those examples were taken from the citizenship test that can only be described as a new Labour fantasy about the level of knowledge that we would all have about our country.
I will not go on with further examples of questions that I failed—
Mr Harper
My hon. Friend appears to be working seamlessly in tandem with me, because if I turn over the page of my brief, I can see that I was about to refer to the 2009 Act. His general point is good. I am not someone who wants to legislate when provisions already exist in primary legislation. In general, more legislation does not necessarily make the world better. He has a formidable reputation for ensuring that all provisions brought before the House are properly scrutinised and challenged to make sure that they are necessary.
The reason we were not able to make the provision is that there was a provision in the 2009 Act to which my hon. Friend refers. However, it was all bound up with the earned citizenship measures that the previous Government wanted to introduce, and it is not possible, I am advised by lawyers, to implement the armed forces provisions independently of the earned citizenship measures because they contain references to the provisions that are not being implemented. That is why it was necessary to implement the provisions separately.
We announced in July 2010 that we would not be proceeding with the earned citizenship provisions in the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009, because we felt that the previous Government’s provisions under those regimes were considerably more complicated and bureaucratic than the current arrangements and would have imposed unwelcome administrative and bureaucratic costs on both central and local government and voluntary sector partners. Both parties represented in the coalition Government voiced concerns about those measures during their parliamentary passage.
So although there are measures on the statute book, they are bound up with measures that we do not wish to commence, and they cannot be commenced separately. I think I can give my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch the reassurance that he seeks, which is that this provision is necessary. There is not a current provision on the statute book that could be commenced by itself which would enable us to achieve the aim. Although I know that he is normally and rightly sceptical of legislating, I can assure him, given that he and others have welcomed the purpose of the Bill, that it is necessary to do so in the Bill. There is no existing provision on the statute book that we could use. I hope he will find that reassuring.
My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire referred to the British overseas territories. I will not repeat the list that she read out, but she may be interested in one fact. She mentioned the Cayman Islands. It may interest the House to know that as of 6 September the Cayman Islands has a new governor, Helen Kilpatrick. The only reason why I mention that is that until she was governor of the Cayman Islands, she was the director general of finance and corporate services at the Home Office and is now resplendent, having been appointed by Her Majesty the Queen from 6 September, as governor of the Cayman Islands. It is not relevant to the Bill, but as I am a Minister in the Home Office and worked closely with Helen Kilpatrick, and as my hon. Friend mentioned the Cayman Islands, I thought there was sufficient reason to mention it in the House. But I digress only briefly.
My hon. Friend spoke about the British overseas territories and whether somebody living in an overseas territory could naturalise under the provisions of the Bill. I mentioned in response to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough in my list of conditions that normally the person is supposed to want to settle and live in the United Kingdom, so if someone was settling in an overseas territory, they would not normally be able to naturalise under section 6(1) of the British Nationality Act because they would not meet the requirement of intending to make their principal home in the United Kingdom. They could qualify if they were intending to continue in Crown service. For example, if they still worked for the Crown and were based overseas in an overseas territory, that would apply.
The appropriate route for somebody in that circumstance—a former member of the armed forces settled in an overseas territory—would be for them to apply for British overseas territory citizenship. They would then need to meet the requirements on the knowledge and good character test.
Harriett Baldwin
I thank the Minister for giving way and for beginning to answer some of the questions that I raised about the territorial extent of the Bill. Does he have any plans to amend the territorial extent of the Bill in Committee, in the light of the fact that there seems to be some ambiguity about whether someone may reside in one of those other territories at the point at which they apply for British citizenship?
Mr Harper
The question is not so much where the person physically is when they apply, but what their intentions are. One of the requirements in the Act, as I read out, is that somebody is supposed to intend to continue to live in the United Kingdom. They are supposed to have residence in the United Kingdom or continue in Crown service. If they intend to continue to live in the overseas territory, they ought to apply for British overseas territory citizenship, rather than British citizenship, as in the Bill.
Harriett Baldwin
I know that I am being obtuse, but I do not understand what the purpose is, then, of having all the overseas and dependent territories in the territorial extent of the Bill.
Mr Harper
I would never accuse my hon. Friend of being obtuse. She and I had a great exchange on her previous private Member’s Bill, as she mentioned, when I occupied a different ministerial role. Of course, it is not just the overseas territories, because the Bill states that the Act will extend to England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and the British overseas territories.
On my hon. Friend’s specific question about why it is necessary to refer to the overseas territories, I will reflect on that and, I hope, come back to it at the end of my remarks. Her specific point was about where someone resides. If someone intended to live in an overseas territory, they would be applying for British overseas territory citizenship, rather than what we have been discussing today.
My hon. Friend also mentioned the requirement to have a sufficient level of English and asked whether that requirement can be waived. The Secretary of State can waive the knowledge-of-life and language requirements for citizenship only in very limited circumstances, which are set out. That means someone who is under 18 or over 65 or someone with a specific physical or mental condition that prevents them from being able to fulfil the requirement. My view is that someone who has served for five years in our armed forces will have no problem with being able to speak English. I do not think that it is unreasonable to expect them to do so.
Harriett Baldwin
What I am really trying to clarify is that language acquisition takes place in a specific part of the brain, in the cerebral cortex, that can be damaged later in life, perhaps as the result of a stroke, so someone might have had a good command of English during their period of service but lost that later. Would the Secretary of State have the discretion to waive the requirement in those circumstances?
Mr Harper
The Secretary of State has the ability to waive the requirement if someone’s physical or mental condition is such that they cannot meet it. That would of course mean somebody who has had the particular medical circumstances my hon. Friend raises, and it would of course cover a former member of the armed forces who had suffered an injury in service that had damaged their ability to communicate. The Secretary of State will have the ability to waive that requirement in those circumstances. Assuming that someone does not suffer from that sort of disability, we would expect them to be able to speak English, and I do not think that would be a problem for someone who had served in our armed forces for a period.
My hon. Friends the Members for West Worcestershire and for Gainsborough referred to the extent to which applying for naturalisation was automatic. It is not automatic; it is something that is considered. There are requirements to be met. Some of them are tick-box requirements, such as how long they have resided, but some are more judgment-related, such as those about good character. For those, the Secretary of State has to apply a considerable amount of judgment.
My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire referred to the new citizenship test that we have introduced, which is much more focused on understanding Britain, our history and culture and, in particular, our democratic values and institutions. I will probably make her blush, but she mentioned that she scored 100% in the test, and the pass mark is 75%, so she is well up there. She referred to how the statistics might have changed. I do not have the precise figures, but the pass rate under the old test was around 75%. It was getting higher as the tests became older and the question bank became out of date and the number of questions reduced. Now that we have introduced the new test, the pass rate has fallen a little, down to about 60%, so it is still quite a challenge. But citizenship is something that people should have to work for. She brandished a book earlier, and all the information required for the test is available. We do not expect people to know it all without putting some study in, but the information is all available.
Harriett Baldwin
Is the Minister saying that although the pass mark for both tests has remained at 75%, about 75% of people got through on the previous version of the test but the more recent data suggest that the pass rate has dropped to between 60% and 65%?
Mr Harper
My hon. Friend is spot on.
I have now been inspired so let me answer my hon. Friend’s question about the territorial extent of the Bill. Because the Bill amends the British Nationality Act, we were keen to make the territorial extent the same. Because the BNA has provisions dealing with British overseas citizenship, it extends to the British overseas territories. If the extent of the amending Act were different, that could cause confusion and doubt in a case in which the overseas territories were involved. The amending Act therefore needs to have the same territorial extent as the Act that we are amending.
Harriett Baldwin
I thank the Minister for his excellent explanation. It answers the question I asked my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) about the territorial extent of the 1981 Act. However, it remains for me to ask the Minister whether, because this is a separate piece of legislation, it could have a narrower territorial extent in order to address some of the points I raised about the possibility that someone could not even live in the UK and still acquire British citizenship.
Mr Harper
I heard my hon. Friend ask that question of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and I think that he disabused us of our expectation that he was supposed to have followed all the detail when he reminded us that he was not in the House in 1981 when the Act was passed. Whether the original oversight was, to use his phrase, cock-up or conspiracy, I know not. I was only 11 when the Bill went through the House. I fear that I did not follow parliamentary proceedings very closely when I was 11—perhaps that is a terrible admission—and so I did not follow its passage very closely either. I suspect that he is right and it was more cock-up than conspiracy.
When I was setting out the details on family circumstances, my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough asked whether, to use his phrase, the clock was ticking. Family members of armed forces personnel are not exempt from immigration control, but, provided they have appropriate leave under the immigration rules, the time they spend with their armed forces sponsor, either in the UK or when they are on accompanied service, is time they can count towards naturalisation. They need to meet the residency requirements, but, as for service personnel, the Secretary of State has the discretion to waive and overlook those requirements if the absence from the UK was as a result of accompanying a person on service overseas. I hope that that is helpful and answers my hon. Friend. He is nodding, which suggests that that is the case.
The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North asked about medical discharge. For settlement applications, the requirement for four years’ service can be waived if an illness or injury is attributable to service and is sustained in an operational theatre. If not, a number of factors will be considered, including the severity of the injury, length of service, the prognosis for recovery, and the applicant’s ability to support himself or herself. We may give limited leave where the applicant does not qualify for settlement but needs a period of recovery before they leave the United Kingdom. A member of the armed forces who is granted settlement following medical discharge will be able to apply for citizenship after 12 months. I do not know whether the specific case that the hon. Lady mentioned relates to one of her constituents. If so, and she wants to write to me to raise particular issues, I will obviously be happy to look into them and respond accordingly.
I shall return to the remarks I intended to make—I have not made a great deal of progress because I have dealt with a number of questions. I support what my hon. Friend the Member for Woking said in introducing the Bill. The Government agree that it is wrong that a member of our armed forces should have to wait longer to gain citizenship just because they happened to be posted overseas at the relevant time. The service charities have told us that, and it was recognised as a priority commitment under the armed forces covenant. Once implemented, the Bill will enable us to overlook the requirement to be in the UK on day one of the qualifying period for naturalisation in the same way that we overlook the requirement to have resided in the UK.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough or my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch—I forget which, because they were sitting next to each other and both raised a number of points—asked whether the Bill will be retrospective. The Bill will not be retrospective in the sense that it will go back and alter anyone’s existing naturalisation status. However, there is a retrospective element in the sense that the Bill will look back at what happened to applications five years ago and where people were. When the Bill is enacted, not being in the UK at the beginning of the five-year period will cease to be a disadvantage. To that extent, the Bill will be retrospective, but it will not alter the position of someone who has gone through the process of making an application.
When the Bill becomes law—I hope it will—someone who made a failed application or who held off making an application and had to wait for a longer period because they did not meet the requirement will be in a position to make an application under the new rules. If the other conditions are met, the Secretary of State will be in a position to overlook the requirement to have been in the UK at the beginning of the process. The Bill will therefore benefit people who are not currently serving but who have served previously, and that will be welcome.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Mark Harper and Harriett Baldwin(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
T4. What overall progress is the Minister making on reducing net migration into the UK to a more sustainable level?
The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)
I am pleased to tell my hon. Friend that the last set of immigration statistics saw a fall of a quarter in net migration, and we are on track to reduce it from the unsustainable hundreds of thousands that it was under Labour to a much more sustainable tens of thousands, which is what the vast majority of the British public want.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Mark Harper and Harriett Baldwin(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
2. Whether her Department has taken steps to ensure the continuity of supply of seasonal agricultural workers following the lifting of restrictions on immigration from Bulgaria and Romania.
The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)
The transitional restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians come to an end at the end of this year. With reference to the agricultural industry, we will look to see whether any further schemes are necessary once the Migration Advisory Committee has reported to us in March this year.
Harriett Baldwin
As the Minister knows, the finest fruit and vegetables are grown in West Worcestershire. Can he reassure my farmers that they will be able to face the 2014 growing and picking season with the confidence that, working together with the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, there will be an adequate supply of people to pick the crops?
Mr Harper
I can give my hon. Friend that assurance. In December I met one of the West Midlands Members of the European Parliament, Anthea McIntyre, together with farmers who farm both in Herefordshire and in my constituency in the soft fruit sector. That may be the one respect in which I slightly disagree with my hon. Friend. I have listened to their concerns and will listen to what the Migration Advisory Committee says in its report before we take a decision early this year.
Legislation (Territorial Extent) Bill
Debate between Mark Harper and Harriett Baldwin(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Harriett Baldwin
With the leave of the House, I would like to answer some of the Minister’s points and thank everyone who has spoken today, either in support of or against the Bill. A wide range of interesting points have been made. I agree with the Minister that my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) was a little optimistic when he said that the matter could be sorted out by next Tuesday.
I welcome the fact that the Minister made it clear that he does not intend to kick the issue into the long grass. He also reassured us that the consultation that is under way on setting the terms of reference for the commission, its membership and who might chair it will be short. He gave us a great deal of confidence that we would know who those people are by 31 December. That is reassuring.
However, we still need to discuss some of the points that I raised earlier. The Bill provides for all proposed legislation to include, on the face of the measures, the implications for the Barnett or any successor formula. In the discussion of the terms of reference of the commission, we want it to examine that. Although I agree that we do not want an enormous amount of bureaucracy expended on spelling out the financial implications, it would be helpful to the House, and potentially the Speaker, if the commission considered whether the proposal was helpful. I was therefore not reassured to hear that the House could not consider the financial implications until the deficit was tackled. As we heard earlier, Members will want to know the consequences for the Barnett or any successor formula.
We did not hear what sort of scrutiny the Chamber might be able to undertake if the commission recommends a change to Standing Orders. The Minister mentioned a range of solutions that the commission might devise, and the options will be the subject of continuing interest to hon. Members. Even if there were no legislative solution, I presume that the House would have to have an opportunity to discuss them.
Mr Harper
I was not very specific about the way in which the House will deal with the matter because we do not know what the solutions will be. Clearly, there would be an opportunity, if it was appropriate, for the House to debate the conclusions. If there was a proposal to change Standing Orders, a motion to do that would be tabled, which the House would debate and vote on. To some extent, it depends on the commission’s recommendations. The danger of my being too specific is that the point of setting up the commission is for it to use its expertise to devise solutions. I do not want to prejudge the solutions. If I did that, there would not be much point in having a commission.
Harriett Baldwin
I thank the Minister for that clarification. It leads me to my final reaction to his statement. As he acknowledged, it is disappointing that the commission will not be given an out date. It would not have been impossible for us to hear today the Minister’s expectations of an out date. Is it likely to fall during the current parliamentary Session, or after the Queen’s Speech? I feel that it should be timely enough to enable Members to resolve this complex issue before the next general election looms.
Mr Harper
Let me clarify what I said. I did not say that there would be no out date; I simply said that I had not reached a conclusion that I could share with my hon. Friend today. Obviously, when a commission is established it must be given some idea of when it is supposed to report, and, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South, we want to solve the problem before it has to be solved in a moment of crisis. Setting up the commission is not an attempt to kick the issue into the long grass. We want it to come up with workable solutions which the House can then debate and put into action.
Harriett Baldwin
I thank the Minister for his clarification, but I am not sure that I heard within it a specific timetable that he had in mind. I would expect an out date for the commission to be some time within the current Session. I would probably accept that it could potentially be as long as 12 months after its establishment, but I would consider even that to be quite a long time, given that it has taken us 16 months to get a written ministerial statement giving notice that it would be established.
Legislation (Territorial Extent) Bill
Debate between Mark Harper and Harriett Baldwin(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Harper
I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. I detected that the House probably felt that that part of the debate had run its course.
My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) made a powerful speech in favour of the Union, but he cautioned about the reason why we should answer the West Lothian question. He noted that in last year’s general election, the Conservative party had a majority of seats in England and that if our right hon. Friend the Prime Minister had not led in such a bold fashion to put together this coalition, an alternative might well have caused a constitutional crisis. That suggests how important it is for the Government to deal with this issue now. It is better to deal with the question and provide a possible solution, however complex that may be, in an atmosphere of relative calm rather than to solve it hurriedly in an atmosphere of crisis. I hope that all those of a Unionist inclination—probably every Member in the House today—will agree that it is better to look at these matters sensibly and implement solutions calmly rather than wait for the crisis to happen, when significant pressure might come from English voters to solve the problem, making it more difficult to resolve it calmly and sensibly.
My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South referred to the opportunity cost of doing nothing, which might ultimately put the Union at risk. He ran through a number of what he called “perfect”—perhaps better described as “tidy”—solutions, but noted that there were good reasons to believe that they would not work. He suggested—I think it was the same conclusion as that put forward by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington—that there is no single tidy solution, but that a number of imperfect solutions could deal with the nub of the issue. I believe that a number of my hon. Friends reached the same conclusion.
My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) also rightly drew attention to the fact that there is no simple solution. He ran through a number of solutions and noted some concerns about them, including about the solution of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington, which my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset believed might face some difficult procedural problems. His key point was that people must think that any proposed solution is fair—fair to all parts of the United Kingdom. He also flagged up the potential risk of an election result in which a majority party in England was not the same as the Government at Westminster. He correctly put his finger on the fact that that would indeed constitute a risk to the Union. He argued in favour of a classic British fudge, suggesting that a party that did not have a majority in England but was in government at Westminster would need a self-denying ordinance. Perhaps some solutions could be put in place along those lines. All the issues show how complicated the problem is.
The Bill proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire puts forward a number of solutions. There are two new duties on any Minister publishing legislation in draft. Clause 1 deals with the first duty, which is to
“ensure that the legal and financial effect of that legislation on each part of the United Kingdom is separately and clearly identified.”
The second duty, in clause 3, is to “make a statement” that the Bill is
“compatible with the principles of legislative territorial clarity, or”
if the Bill is not compatible with them, to make a similar statement where
“the government nonetheless wishes to proceed.”
This is my hon. Friend’s attempt, I think, to set out clearly in the Bill that the Government must make those judgments so that the Chair would not be drawn into controversy. The principles of legislative clarity are set out in clause 4, which states that
“every citizen of the United Kingdom has the right to see how proposed changes to the law will affect them”
and that hon. Members of this House
“have the right to see how proposed changes to the law will affect their constituents.”
I believe those are sensible principles, but I hope to persuade the House and my hon. Friend that her Bill is not necessarily the best way of advancing those objectives.
My hon. Friend has sensibly made the Bill apply only to draft legislation, to preserve the independence of Parliament from the courts, and to protect its exclusive cognisance. Had she attempted to set down in legislation how actual Bills were presented to the House, that might have opened up the opportunity for courts to involve themselves in our legislative procedures. She has avoided that danger, but the flipside is that her Bill will affect only draft legislation and, therefore, it will not affect every Bill brought to the House. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset highlighted an alternative, non-legislative solution, which is to deal with such matters in the Standing Orders of the House. He also noted the difficulties in that approach, such as not being able to entrench the provision.
By mirroring the provisions in section 19 of the Human Rights Act, which requires Ministers to make a statement of compatibility with the convention, the requirement under clause 3 of the Bill is carefully drafted so as not to fall foul of the exclusive cognisance principle. The duty is on Ministers, rather than being a legislative requirement. The flaw is that the Bill imposes requirements on Government that are already in place and with which the Government should comply. As has been noted, the Cabinet Office’s “Guide to Making Legislation” already provides that the territorial extent and application of legislation should be set out in a statement at the beginning of the explanatory notes, in whatever form of words is appropriate to the Bill. In addition, it provides that where a Bill makes different provision for the different nations of the United Kingdom, that should be outlined in the explanatory notes, setting out the territorial extent of each part of the Bill separately if necessary.
Harriett Baldwin
I thank the Minister for his perceptive comments about what I have tried to avoid in drafting the Bill. I am glad that he accepts that the principles of the Bill are sound, even if its wording might be modified by the Government in Committee, which I would welcome. The Bill moves civil service guidance on to a statutory footing, thus strengthening the whole process.
Mr Harper
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that clarification. It comes back to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset that the Bill does nothing harmful, but nor does it take us much further forward. I start from the position, as do the Government, that we should not legislate for unnecessary matters that do not add anything.