New Clause 2
Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]
1:00 pm
Damian Green (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Ashford, Conservative)
I hoped that you were hoping that I would say it, Sir Nicholas.
When I was interrupted by the suspension this morning, I was praying in aid senior police officers in favour of our proposal in new clause 2 for a border police force. I had just moved on to Sir Ian Blair, who is not often prayed in aid from these Benches but who was right on this issue. He said in February 2005 that when the country
“got into the debate about SOCA, it surprised me that we did not have a national border police.”
I suppose that I should emphasise for the purposes of Hansard that when I refer to SOCA, I am talking about the Serious Organised Crime Agency.
Sir Ian Blair repeated that opinion:
“I have always thought that having a national border police was a good idea...I am very supportive of this issue.”
I have suggested a number of growing serious international crimes with which the border police would deal, and I want to return for a moment to the subject of human trafficking, because it is the fastest-growing international crime in the world. It is up there with transporting guns and drugs across frontiers, and I suspect, unfortunately, that it will continue to grow and become ever more serious. The UK is one of the biggest destination countries—I think that it is the biggest in Europe at the moment—for that crime. The Minister can correct me if he thinks that I am wrong, but whether we are or not, human trafficking is a serious problem for us. Not only are we a destination country, we are a transit country as well.
The latest estimate is that 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year. The number of women in the UK who are victims of trafficking is, of course, difficult to estimate, but there are many thousands. The figures for off-street prostitution are stark, vivid and terrible. Whereas 10 years ago, 15 per cent. of such women were foreign, the number is now about 85 per cent., according to some of the surveys I have seen. The proportion of women involved in prostitution who come from abroad has been turned on its head. Inevitably, large numbers of those women were trafficked here deceitfully, having been promised lives as waitresses and so on and then exploited by criminal gangs. The other, particularly horrific part of the trade is the trafficking of children, which also appears to be growing. In an attempt to combat that particularly evil trade alone, it will be worth while having a specialist border police force.
I emphasise the point that a specialised police service is particularly effective in fighting new types of crime. The Committee will be aware that we set up a committee under Lord Stevens, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to review our border security arrangements as a whole. His committee, which was full of other senior police officers and former Home Office officials, concluded that only a unified border force could protect our borders effectively. We are now building on the valuable and useful work of Lord Stevens and his committee to develop the detail of what we can do and when we can do it.
I share the Minister’s concern that we should change our policing and other control systems gradually so that there is not too much disruption to existing activities. We know that it ought to be possible for a new force to be effective and that it ought to be able to protect our borders. We have discussed the one land border that this country has, and there is division across the Committee on how we should deal with it, given the common travel area, but there should be no division about whether all other UK borders can be defended. They ought to be defensible, but they are not defended well enough at the moment.
Experience in other areas of crime prevention shows that the type of specialisation we propose has been effective, so there is no reason why it could not be applied at the border. We also feel that the proposal has a tide running behind it. An early proponent was the Select Committee on Home Affairs, in a previous incarnation. In a report as far back as 2001, it recommended
“a single frontier force on the basis of secondment and direct employment, but with clear lines of communication”.
That was six years ago, and some steps toward better co-ordination of our enforcement activities at the border have been taken, but the Government have not taken the big, important step of not only involving the police but allowing them to set up a unified border force. I cannot remember how many times I have urged the Government do that when we have debated immigration Bills, but I do so strongly once again. We think that would be an important step forward in improving the safety of our borders and therefore the security of all those who live within our borders.