Damian Green (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Ashford, Conservative)

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

This debate has become a regular feature of immigration Bills, in that since 2007 Opposition Members have come to the conclusion that we need a unified border police force in this country, and have sought to persuade the Government of that in several immigration Bills in both Houses. We seek to do so again. There was a good debate on the subject in the other place. This is an idea whose time has come, and I sense that it is an idea that the Government are inching towards but, for reasons that I have never quite understood, will not actually adopt.

It is unarguable that we ought to protect our borders better than we do. Britain is a series of islands. We do not face the land border problems faced by many other countries that are desirable targets for illegal immigration and cross-border crime, but we ought to be able to defend our borders better than we do. Our defences are not adequate.

The new clause would be a significant step forward. We think that it would be a more effective step forward than the one that the Government have taken, which we do not oppose—that is, to merge some of the functions of the UK Border Agency and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs at the border—but we think it illogical that the police should be the one body that is still doing all the work in a fragmented way.

Experience of policing more widely shows us that specialisation of police services is more effective, particularly in fighting the new types of crime that have hit society in recent years. We therefore believe that the Bill as it stands is a severe missed opportunity.

The Minister himself admitted that our border controls are too lax. He stated:

“We have, compared to other rich countries, been liberal in our border controls.”

I believe that that is an accurate quote.

The Prime Minister admitted that Britain is suffering from the failure to tackle organised immigration crime. On 12 May, he stated:

“As well as street gangs we are seeing increasingly sophisticated international criminal networks which operate in the shadows but are responsible for the worst kind of crimes: people trafficking, drugs, and—as we saw with the Gooch gang in Manchester—gun crime...we need to go further”.

In that, I agree with him.

In July 2007, the Prime Minister announced that he would introduce a new border force. It involved a link-up between the UKBA and HMRC’s customs operations. However, if that is as far as the Government will go—that seems to be the case; it has certainly been the case argued by Ministers up to now—it is not far enough or good enough.

Clearly, the police are the body with the greatest expertise in fighting cross-border crime. I am sure that the Minister, too, finds as he goes around the country that the level of expertise is inherently patchy. Constabularies such as Kent, which have borders and big ports to control, develop expertise, but other police forces inevitably have less to do with such things and so develop less expertise.

Protecting our borders, and particularly fighting illegal immigration, cannot be done only at UK borders. The Minister says continually that he wants to export the border and do some border protection work overseas, which is fine, but I urge him to recognise that protecting our borders and combating illegal immigration, particularly human trafficking and illegal working, also takes place inside our borders. If one wants to be more effective in fighting illegal working and the sex trafficking aspect of human trafficking, one must be more effective all over the country, not just in our big cities. Some of the worst immigration-related crimes take place in small towns and villages throughout the country. A shocking change in human trafficking over the past few years is that brothels with young women who are often duped into coming here are not a feature just of our bigger cities and of our inner cities. They crop up in many places. There have been some in my constituency, which is a prosperous part of Kent where one would not expect to find them, and my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who has done so much good work in  raising the consciousness of this place to human trafficking, says that he finds the problem in Devon, and that it simply did not exist two or three years ago.

That is an illustration of the wider point. We must do much better, and the Government’s action so far is simply not enough. The facts speak for themselves. The estimate of illegal immigration can never be precise, but the most recent, which the Government carried out, suggests that it was anything up to 500,000. The Minister will have seen the report commissioned by the Mayor of London, which puts the figure slightly higher at about 600,000. Clearly, it is likely to be in that sort of ball park, and we all agree that we must cut it.

In other crime areas, drug offences rose 68 per cent. between 1998-99 and 2007-08, and that is another big cross-border trade. We cannot tackle crime effectively while our borders are so porous. We have debated where illegal immigrants come from and the routes that they use to become illegal immigrants. My best guess is that about 60 per cent. arrive illegally. We know that apart from the appalling effect on lives, the economic and social costs of people trafficking are more than £1 billion a year, and it seems likely that the regrettable increase in gun crime in this country is being fuelled by the illegal supply of weapons into the UK, particularly from eastern Europe.

The tasks facing a border police force are huge, and hugely important. Each area, whether trafficking, drugs, guns or illegal immigration, would justify the creation of such a force. The fact that we are facing such growth in all four of those areas at the same time seems to be an extremely strong argument for such a force. If the Government are unwilling to accept the Opposition’s argument, perhaps they will listen to others. Sir Chris Fox, when president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said on 25 March 2006:

“Personally I think we should have a Border Force. I think we should have a group of people that are made up of Police Officers, Special Branch, Immigration Officers, Customs, who have a total responsibility for all our points of entry.”

I may surprise the Minister by praying in aid Sir Ian Blair—