Clause 9
Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]
12:15 pm
Damian Green (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Ashford, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 9, page 6, line 37, leave out ‘make arrangements to delegate’ and insert
‘designate by approval of the Secretary of State’.
I rise very positively to my feet to move this amendment, Sir Nicholas.
The purpose of the amendment is to make a subtle change. The Minister has already referred to the Carltona principle—it is a good party game to play at the Committee stage of any Bill to see how far you can get through before somebody mentions the Carltona principle. Those of us who do these things regularly can remember from year to year what it is, but I suspect that if we conducted a quiz among Members, many of them would not necessarily know what the Carltona principle is. It dates back to 1943—I see that I am causing puzzlement. I have a briefing that shows that:
“The case most often cited is Carltona Ltd v Commissioners of Works 1943.”
It is an important and sensible principle. It strikes me as bizarre that the ability to transfer powers to an official from a Secretary of State had not been firmly established before 1943—there had been Government Departments for more than a century before then. We might go a long way off-piste musing on, first, the relationship between Ministers and their officials in earlier times and, secondly, the efficacy of Government when there were fewer of either Ministers or officials and this country ran half the globe. I am getting slightly off the subject here.
Let me move back to the powers held by the director of border revenue and the possibility of their transference to another official. That is slightly different from the straightforward transfer of powers from the Secretary of State to other officials. Clause 9 refers to the director of border revenue delegating powers. This amendment seeks to allow that to happen—it is entirely sensible and unremarkable that that should happen—but only with the approval of the Secretary of State. It is limiting the power of the director of border revenue to delegate functions to those conferred by the Bill. The purpose of this is not particularly to modify the powers of the director, but to probe the other functions it is intended to confer on the director. We have had one helpful debate about the role of the director vis-Ă -vis other parts of the immigration system, but this would be an appropriate point in the passage of the Bill to explore the full range of the director’s powers. It is perfectly reasonable to be wary of giving powers to an official if we are not sure of the full raft of powers that that official will have.
It is convenient to have reached this debate, in which we seek to insert the Secretary of State into the process to ensure that we are not giving too much power to an official when in some cases it would be better exercised by the political leadership, so that there is some kind of democratic accountability to this place in the powers of the director of border revenue.
Although this small amendment deals with only one aspect of the director’s powers, I hope that the Minister will take it as an invitation to spread a bit more widely and explain to us the full range of the director’s powers as well, obviously, as the important point about why the Secretary of State should not have some say when powers are delegated further down the organisation.