Clause 14
Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]
12:45 pm
Damian Green (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Ashford, Conservative)
The Minister says that it is the best in the world. I dare say that some other countries come to look in at it, and I would see what they say when they have left. The specific problem with the clause is that yet again, the Government are falling through the trap of making the system as intrusive as possible for the respectable traveller, whether coming to Britain or taking a trip away from here, while not necessarily collecting all the information that will be needed to track our professional criminals or terrorists. Essentially, my fear is that we are setting up the worst of all worlds, where the general aggregation of private information about entirely innocent British citizens will be more intrusive than any other regime in the democratic world. At the same time, it is not at all clear that those who quite properly should be stopped and checked and have their details down will be caught.
One of the paradoxes that the Minister needs to address is the sheer weight of information that is being collected, and the sheer length of time that it is being collected for, which may well militate against the effective action against those who we all want to stop. We have seen the manifold failures of databases—again, this is not the appropriate clause under which to discuss the matter—and it must have impinged on the Government now that simply collecting more information about entirely innocent journeys and people and keeping it for longer is not the most effective way of making our borders secure. It is not, in this context, the best way of ensuring that we get the appropriate customs information and then using that information to contribute to the general safety of the border.
As people increasingly understand that point, those who find their journeys made more difficult—they might have to queue for longer—or feel that they have to give up unnecessary information to immigration and customs officials, their resentment about the queues and the information that they are giving will increase. They will want to know that every piece of information collected is necessary, and also what is going to happen to that information, even if it is not left on a disc or a laptop stuck on a train by somebody going home at night. Who in Government has access to it? It is precisely apparently harmless clauses in Bills such as this one, about the use and disclosure of customs information, that allow information to be collected and spread. That should ring alarm bells in anyone who cares about privacy.
I invite members of the Committee who have not necessarily studied every last comma of the Bill to look at the clause very carefully, and look at the powers that are being given to officials to collect and disseminate information. We are now entering a part of the Bill that is potentially quite dangerous for the future of the privacy of innocent British citizens and for the effectiveness of the attack on immigration and customs crime, which is the purpose of this part of the Bill. I hope—but not very expectantly—that perhaps Minister can reassure me on those points.