My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness on having introduced the debate. She was right to do so. It is very important that this matter should receive scrutiny and consideration in this House.

I am deeply concerned by the situation in which we find ourselves because it seems to me that when we talk about the kind of society we want to be in—we spend an awful lot of time talking about that—what really matters, and the values which we have as central to that society, should be evident in all aspects of our life. People, however reluctantly, can understand the need for immigration controls and immigration policy. That is true of this country and of our friends abroad. What upsets people is when, within that immigration policy, we do not follow through the logic which we say is vital to maintaining the values and behaviour which we see as being central to our nation.

I am really very disturbed that we are speaking with forked tongues on the issue of family. We keep emphasising the importance of family in our own society, but it does not apply to people who have been allowed through the immigration system to come and join us and make a contribution to our society. Either the family matters or it does not. I found the evidence submitted by the BMA, to which my noble friend Lord Parekh has already referred, very interesting. It talks not just about the personal pressures but about the quality of work undertaken by doctors if they are surrounded by their family or if they are debarred from having their family with them. If we see these doctors as essential to the operation of our health service—and, my God, they make a huge contribution to our health and well-being—it is terribly important that family values should apply, to enable them to perform at their best.

My noble friend, Lord Parekh, in a delightful but telling way, wove together the principle and practicalities of this. We all know, in our own families, how important grandparents are to the operation of the family, enabling mothers to work and running children to school and to their activities. Grandparents have a crucial part to play in the success of the family as part of society. It is shooting ourselves in the foot to say that we want people who are entitled to come through our immigration system, and to welcome them so long as they are making a full, positive contribution to our society, but then to deny those very aspects of life which will enable them to maximise their performance. It just does not make sense.

I also want to pick up on the more difficult, contentious issue of the operation of our penal system. If people have had sentences over a certain period of time they are subject to deportation. I have seen too much evidence that the impact on the children is not taken into account in these decisions. Sometimes there is a quite cynical neglect of any consideration whatever of the children in the paperwork and the rest. We were pioneers—I repeat, pioneers—in the creation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in which, I am glad to say, the Conservative Party played a big part. We won great international esteem for the part we played, as I was saying the other night in our deliberations on the Children and Families Bill. We have a long way to fall and I am afraid we are falling. What people judge us by is not what we said at the time of the convention’s creation but how we actually operate the convention, not only in detail but in spirit, in our own society and the way we go about organising our affairs. I am not going to say there have not been some marginal improvements, and of course there are some very fine people working in this area. However, are we absolutely certain that the child is central to our considerations in all the work of the UK Border Agency and all the work of the Home Office on deportation in connection with crime? That is what the convention, which we helped to draft, demands. Is the child central to our considerations? This needs to be taken very seriously indeed.

In conclusion, all of us, whatever our party differences across the House, want to live in a nation that feels at peace with itself—a nation that is confident in the underlying principles in our society. We all want to be seen as a nation that is not only successful and achieving in materialist terms but whose characters of compassion, care and concern are self-evident in everything that we do and the way that we go about it. I am not denying the need for an immigration policy—of course I am not, it would be nonsense—but those principles, which are admittedly difficult and challenging, have to be seen as applying in the operation of that policy. I am glad that the noble Baroness has given us the opportunity to look at these issues. Some of them need to be examined very carefully indeed.