Clause 5
UK Borders Bill
3:00 pm
Liam Byrne (Minister of State (Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality), Home Office; Birmingham, Hodge Hill, Labour)
I am happy to clarify that point. It is not that three quarters of the world’s population will require a biometric visa at some point in the future, it is that they require a visa today. From 2008, all visa posts will issue biometric visas. There is a requirement for the remaining quarter of the world’s population to secure a visa if they are coming to work, study or stay for longer than six months.
How Britain keeps under review the issue of whether visa requirements are imposed on the right countries is an open question. All sorts of considerations have to be taken into account, some of which were raised by the hon. Member for Monmouth, who mentioned the closeness of our links to the country concerned, the strength of its security controls and the economic impact of the relationship. We will have more to say about that issue, which I realise is not subject to the amendment, in the months to come. The key point is that biometric visas would cease to be issued if the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden got his hands on the contract book, because he would close down that system.
The purpose of many of the amendments is quite rightly to secure a much greater degree of transparency in the way in which regulations are drafted and codes of practice developed. We want the flexibility to keep the regulations up to date, because security features that we want to bring online might be added to the national security scheme, for example. We might add to the categories of information that we collect; we have talked at length about new categories of leave to remain, such as that for ministers of religion, and we have highlighted the importance of certain categories of information, such as whether people are married and therefore eligible for spouse visas. That flexibility is important.
I do not think that any member of the Committee would want a situation in which people were here without leave and were not required to keep their documents up to date so that it was clear whether they had a right to be here. There is rightly concern about the level of performance throughout the IND’s operations, which was at the heart of what the hon. Member for Rochdale said.
In other countries, our entry clearance officers work in some pretty difficult and often quite dangerous circumstances, as the hon. Member for Hertsmere said. They do the job well and provide a service that is extremely good internationally. That said, is it good enough? No, it is not. Does it need to be better? Yes, it does. Does there need to be greater transparency? Yes, of course there must be. That is why I propose to bring forward amendments, which I hope to table this afternoon, that will set out in some depth the kind of functions that a new, stronger, more powerful regulator would provide. That would include an investigation into whether the IND is operating effectively in accordance with race relations regulations and whether there is consistency in the quality of its operations. Is there consistency in how it is following the rules in its enforcement operations? That is particularly relevant to this morning’s debate. I do not propose that the regulator would produce reports that it kept secret or submitted only to the Secretary of State, as it is vital that Parliament can scrutinise the reports to see whether the service is improving. I have said on the record many times that it is important that communities throughout the country have a chance to see how the immigration service is doing where they live, and the regulator should help with that target.
The Bill states that the Secretary of State may issue codes of practice that require authorised persons to have regard to them. That is important; it is expressed in that way because we want to undertake a thorough exploration of whether existing codes provide the best means of securing the ends that Opposition Members rightly seek. Those codes are most likely to be the Police and Criminal Evidence Act codes issued in 1984, which are rightly regarded as something of a gold standard and encompass processes that would include taking biometric information. They would set out the processes that are involved and they are tried and tested, well recognised and probably the right basis for the codes that the Secretary of State would issue to guide authorised persons in the work that they do in this respect.