Serious Crime Bill [HL]

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Marlesford]

40: After Clause 47, insert the following new Clause—
“UK Passport Office powersForeign passport declaration
(1) Subject to subsection (2), where a person holds, tries to renew or to obtain a British passport, the UK Passport Office may require that person to provide information about any foreign passport or passports they currently hold or have held in the past and may further require that person to notify the UK Passport Office of any subsequently acquired foreign passport.
(2) Such information must be considered by the UK Passport Office to be of use for combatting terrorism or other serious or organised crime.
(3) Any information so obtained by the UK Passport Office may be retained by that Office and used for the purpose of combatting terrorism or serious or organised crime.”

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I make no apology for raising again the issue of foreign passports. I say straightaway that I am not proposing, and have never proposed, any restrictions of any sort on people holding foreign passports.

I last raised this matter on 7 April as an amendment to the Immigration Bill. It was of course opposed by the Home Office for the usual NIH reasons. Of all departments, the Home Office more than others rejects ideas that do not originate from its own creative and fertile mind. However, the problem is that the Home Office, especially in recent years, has not always been good at joined-up thinking, so it can be an obstacle to joined-up government. That is why I fear that my noble friend the Minister is probably under riding instructions to say that my proposal for there to a requirement that details of foreign passports held by British passport-holders should be with the Passport Office is unnecessary and irrelevant in the war against terrorism, serious crime or organised crime. There is a second reason. The Passport Office is at present in considerable difficulties and may regard itself as incapable of handling the changes that are needed, however urgent they are. I shall give a little detail of this later.

I bring forward the amendment in the context of the menace of the deep cloud of Islamist terrorism. Tragically, the fundamentally good and admirable purposes of Islam—one of the three great monotheistic religions, which has given the world so much in science, culture and ethics and has historically been a haven for religious tolerance—and the true religious dimension of it as laid out in the Koran, which at its finest level is expressed by the mystical doctrine of Sufi, have been undermined by the medieval intolerance of the Wahabi sect and hijacked by political Islam, with its armed terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and now ISIS, which are engaged in the savage and cruel civil war between the Sunnis and the Shias.

--- Later in debate ---

I realise that he may not be fully satisfied with my response, although I hope I have been able to reassure him that these data are already collected at the point at which a passport application is made and that the information is available to other agencies where it is relevant to their function. On that basis, I hope my noble friend will withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Attlee for his comments. He was absolutely right: we had to adapt the amendment to the Bill. The Minister’s answer was exactly as I expected and also quite revealing. The emphasis on the Passport Office’s burden reflects my point that I suspect that its internal problems mean that it feels that it could not cope with it, and that if anything makes the proposal go away, so much the better. What he says is the Passport Office’s view is not the one that has been expressed to me by a number of people in the security world, which is that this is necessary.

I was not, of course, suggesting that the caliphate passport would ever be shown to a British Border Force inspector. The whole point about the caliphate passport is that it will be used in the sort of countries where we would want to know a British passport holder had been doing things. The one thing he has not mentioned is that there is a greatly increasing and very serious threat of Islamist terrorism from the al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist wings of political Islam. Pray God there is not, but if there were some terrible atrocity and it was found later that we had no idea what was likely but that we might have done if we had realised a person was moving around with other passports, there would be some regret at the Government’s line.

Frankly, the Government are wrong about this. The passport is a powerful weapon for defending our borders but full use is not made of it. I very much hope that the Permanent Secretary who has been tasked with looking at the Passport Office will consider these issues. As I said earlier, I pay tribute to the Border Force, which has greatly improved since Admiral Montgomery took it over from the Civil Service. As I said last time, I suspect we will gradually tiptoe towards a sounder way of making the best use of the passport system to protect us and our citizens. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 40 withdrawn.