---

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I have some points to make on these amendments and some questions, which the Minister or the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, may be able to deal with at the end.

Amendment 100 proposes a requirement to produce an annual report. I am broadly not in favour of these. They seem to just dump a load of bureaucracy on departments, which then have to set up a team of people who spend all their time producing glossy documents that nobody reads, and it takes up a lot of time. I sort of understand why she said it, but the noble Baroness said that, if you have to produce a report, you then have to do some things to put in the report. I do not want the Home Office doing things just to put them in a report. I want it making sensible decisions on our strategic policing choices and doing those things, not things to fill a report up. There is a danger in putting in statute stuff that you have to do. These are not suggestions that the noble Baroness’s amendment is making; departments would have to do them as a priority over other things because it would be a legal requirement. I am not awfully keen on that.

I am not entirely clear—by the way, this is not a request to make the proposed new clause broader—why the noble Baroness has picked just Europol. The problem with organised crime gangs and international groups—Europol deals with not just trafficking but drug trafficking, human trafficking, terrorism and cybercrime—is that these things are global problems, not European problems. Europe as a key territory for us in the issue of people trafficking, but it is not the only place people come from.

We should remember that, large though the small boats problem is, it is still the case that the majority of people who come to the United Kingdom seeking asylum are not coming on small boats but getting here by some other mechanism, including those people who do not have a legitimate claim for asylum, and they are coming from countries around the world. Having this skew towards co-operating with just Europol would be unhelpful. I want Ministers and law enforcement agencies to decide which international agencies they are going to co-operate with based on the threat assessment to the United Kingdom, not based on a statutory provision to have to co-operate with one and not the other.

Specifically in Amendment 101, about a joint task force, particularly concerning is subsection (3) of the proposed new clause. The amendment as a whole would force the Secretary of State to set up a joint task force, but, on what the task force has a duty to do, it says that that has to do with

“matters which the Secretary of State or Director of Europol deem appropriate”.

Fundamentally, it is not right that the director of Europol in effect gets to pick the priorities on which the Secretary of State is then forced to spend resources and focus, even if the Secretary of State does not agree that those are the things she wants to focus on. I want Ministers to remain accountable to Parliament and to make decisions that they think are appropriate and justify them accordingly. This would, in effect, give the director of Europol the ability to direct the resources of the British Government and the British taxpayer, which I do not think is appropriate.

I turn to the last amendment in this group, Amendment 206, about participation in Europol’s anti-trafficking operations. It does not specifically say, but I presume by that we mean human trafficking operations, as opposed to drug trafficking operations. The amendment again would force the Secretary of State, using the word “must”, to

“provide adequate resources to law enforcement agencies for the purpose of enhancing their participation in Europol’s anti-trafficking operations”.

That means operations that Europol is doing. It does not give the Secretary of State discretion to make a judgment about whether she thinks that we should focus our efforts on those anti-trafficking operations but forces her to make available resources, whether she thinks that is appropriate or not—and I do not think it is.

The scope and territorial extent of the Bill is the whole of the United Kingdom: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I am not entirely certain why, for the purposes of proposed new subsection (1), the law enforcement agencies include only the National Crime Agency, police forces in England and Wales, and the BTP. Excellent force though the BTP is—I had some responsibility for it in the past—I do not know why Police Scotland and the Police Service of Northern Ireland are not included. Look at the breadth of Europol’s operations. It seems to me that Police Scotland and the Police Service of Northern Ireland will be absolutely interested in countering terrorism, cybercrime, drug trafficking and human trafficking. Particularly given Northern Ireland’s position, with a land border with a part of the European Union, it seems to me extraordinary that the amendment does not include the Police Service of Northern Ireland. That is an omission. There is a danger once you start listing things in primary legislation. My understanding of how interpretation works is that, by not including things in a list, you make it less possible for them to have the powers than if you had not had a list at all.

Much as I understand the objective and think it perfectly reasonable—to improve co-operation with our partners in other countries on what is, inevitably, a transnational crime—the focus on Europol, and then not looking at other organisations and international law enforcement bodies we could be partnering with, would skew our focus. Ministers ought to be able to make judgments about where we put our resources. We do not have infinite resources. Ministers should have to decide, and law enforcement bodies should be able to choose, where the threats are and what the priorities are on an operational basis, day to day and month to month, not by looking at primary legislation.

I think the fundamentals are misconceived, but there are quite a lot of problems, even if you thought that the fundamentals were not misconceived, in the way that the amendments have been drafted. I hope the noble Baroness will not press them. If she comes back on Report with amendments crafted in perhaps a more focused way, we could look at them further. However, in the way they are set out at the moment, they are not going to deliver the objectives she is hoping they would. I hope the Minister can touch on some of those points when he responds, and the noble Baroness may want to address them when she winds up at the end of this group.

3.15 pm