Clause 6
Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]
12:00 pm
Damian Green (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Ashford, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment 6, in clause 6, page 5, line 3, leave out ‘must’ and insert ‘may’.
The clause deals with the new post of director of border revenue. On the surface, the purpose of the amendment is to give Ministers a flexibility that they may not want, but we also want to tease out the full powers of that new post and the practicalities behind it.
We made some progress in the Lords, where there was a full debate about the new post, which is clearly hugely important. It is designated by the Secretary of State to exercise the functions of border revenue and also to carry out the general customs functions—I take the point the Minister made earlier about how important it is to distinguish the two. Clearly, the director will be the most important person in the whole new regime that this part of the Bill sets up, apart from the Secretary of State himself.
One of the questions I hope the Minister will address is whether it is necessary or contingent that the director of border revenue should always be the head of UKBA, because one of the things that was illuminated in the Lords debate was that that was the intention, and that Lin Homer would be appointed to the post. But it was left unclear as to whether that was a simple convenience at the time, and that she would add that extra role to her accounting officer role in UKBA, or whether it was always envisaged that they would be the same person.
I draw the Minister’s attention to that apparently procedural point because it seems to me to be quite important, because the fluidity of the organisational structure of our immigration system has been extraordinary over the past few years and there may be no reason to believe it will be less so in the future. In the three and a half years I have been my party’s immigration spokesman, we have moved from the Immigration and Nationality Department to the Border and Immigration Agency to the shadow UKBA, and now, from this April, to UKBA. That is four different structures in less than four years. The structure for immigration changes as often as the Home Secretary does; I am now shadowing my fourth Home Secretary as well, although—I am happy to report from the Minister’s point of view—only my third immigration Minister. The job of immigration Minister is very slightly safer than that of Home Secretary.
Behind all that flux is the reason why I asked the question. It is a serious question as to whether it is necessary that the head of UKBA will always be the director of border revenue, because the post of the head of UKBA might itself change radically in future. In particular, if and when we have a fully integrated border police, one can imagine that there will be consequential effects on the organisation within UKBA which might mean that the two posts need not be coterminous.