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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

Given the hon. Gentleman’s background, I am interested to hear that he thinks that £2 billion is not much, but with a billion here and a billion there one is soon talking about real money. The Government and their supporters say that they take the issue seriously and are very concerned about it. But then what happens? To give one example, London is a housing stress area. Some 60 per cent. of immigrants and asylum seekers coming to this country come to London, so several hundred thousand people add to the housing demand in the city. I do not pretend that it is an easy problem to solve, but the Government do not even recognise the problem. That is the problem that we face, and we have to make them think about it. The Secretary of State wanted me to talk about the Bill, so I shall do so. It promises new sanctions against people employing illegal immigrants. We welcome that. The exploitation that has developed in some sectors of our economy in recent years is a disgrace to a civilised society. We would all agree with that. However, sanctions are already available: they just have not been used. There have been only 24 prosecutions in the past seven years under the legislation introduced in 1996, just before the Government came into power. And that is against the backdrop of a group of Chinese dying in the back of a van in Dover and the deaths in Morecambe bay. That is a disgrace. There is no other word for it. I asked the Home Secretary—deliberately, because I want to be helpful on this point—whether he thought that more legislation would help, and he said that it was like the legislation that had been used before. The simple question is why the Government have not used that other legislation. That is what Governments are responsible for and what they are there to do. The Bill promises new powers to track people entering the country, but it does nothing to address the fact that, as I said earlier, 11 out of 35 British ports are manned with security or immigration officials 24 hours a day and the others are not. The Bill contains provisions to allow immigration officers to verify someone’s identity, using the Government’s new favourite thing—biometrics. But as we saw in the ID cards debate, that technology is far from foolproof and remains open to fraud. It is a partial solution, not a panacea. The Bill also contains proposals to change the right of appeal. As I said to the Home Secretary, we shall look at those proposals in detail to check that they strike the right balance between an individual’s rights and the needs of effective administration. We will look carefully at how effective the initial decisions procedure is in making that judgment, and I hope that the Home Secretary will meet his undertaking to take on board the National Audit Office proposals. The Bill is significant not for what it contains but for what it does not contain. At the election, the Opposition set out a clear plan for controlling the number of people coming into Britain and as usual the Government began by ridiculing it, then they attacked it and then they adopted it.