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Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I agree with the noble Baroness that we should be discussing whether Clauses 1 to 36 should stand part, as well as the first two amendments that concern the border police force. I want to make it clear that we accept in principle that UKBA officials should be able to exercise all the revenue and customs functions that are related to HMRC operations at the borders. That is my response to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton; when we are talking about human trafficking, we are talking about its detection and prevention at the borders, not within the United Kingdom as a whole. It is a corollary of having a unified border force that we have these exercises of functions by UKBA officials of what was formerly the sole prerogative of HMRC. General customs matters, which are defined in Clause 1 and exclude matters relating to tax in particular, will be the proper responsibility of designated immigration officers under Clause 3. The designated officer would have the same powers as an HMRC officer with regard to general customs matters, and those include the functions listed in any other enactment except those listed in Clause 1(2). This gives me the opportunity to say that we have concerns about Clauses 16 and 17. That is why we put our names to the amendments leaving out those clauses. I do not know whether the Committee will have seen an article in the Guardian today quoting a paper written by the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, Sir David Omand, in which he says that the security services will have to be given access to a sweeping range of personal data. There are already enormous databases, such as the passenger name records that have to be kept by airlines, that include millions of innocent people. The sharing of personal data between HMRC and UKBA may be a comparatively small step towards Sir David’s ultimate goal, but it is Parliament’s duty to build in ever more powerful safeguards as state agencies accumulate and share increasing amounts of potentially sensitive data about individuals. We would like to hear something from the Minister about how that is to be achieved in the Bill.