UK Borders Bill
1:30 pm
Phil Booth: But there is a point about the impression that people are getting. It is not, as my colleague Guy Herbert said, necessarily the £200 or whatever the current charge is, but that when someone comes to this country they are subjected to an increasingly intrusive regime of fingerprinting and so on. If—this is only anecdotal—people before they come to this country get the impression that Britain is turning into a Big Brother society, they will only have those suspicions confirmed. By going through the process—it is not the fees—we are confirming something that is detracting from our international reputation stretching back over decades and even hundreds of years for being a very free and open country. It is about reputation and how the individual interprets the demands that are put on them that may be more influential than a simple case of who pays the £200, whether it is the institution or the individual.