Immigration and Security

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, on obtaining this timely and important debate and on his introductory speech. I suspect that we have come to the same conclusions by slightly different routes. My personal experience with immigration controls, and therefore with the immigration and asylum system, began when I was appointed Chief Inspector of Prisons. When I was made responsible for the inspection of what were then called immigration detention centres in 1997, I was absolutely appalled by the amount of inefficiency and waste that I found. Immigrants and asylum-seekers were being detained for months, even years, while their cases were allegedly examined in what I can only describe as a dilatory manner. The process for foreign national prisoners sentenced to deportation was started only after they had completed their prison sentences. Legal arrangements for the speedy resolution of asylum applications were totally inadequate. Detention centres lacked detention rules and used totally inapplicable prison rules. There were many other examples.

Later, I was one of the commissioners of an independent asylum commission that examined the whole system and reported in 2009. At the heart of our concerns was the UK Border Agency, with its culture of disbelief, whose word on performance figures we simply could not believe, making us wonder quite how Ministers, deprived of actual facts, could come to meaningful conclusions. Worryingly, appreciation of the faults in the system was not helped by Ministers using that false UKBA evidence to counter outside concerns about actual facts. That is one of the main contributors to the unsatisfactory situation which the Home Secretary is now trying to resolve. This year and last I have been conducting a review of the removal process of those sentenced to deportation and discovered a quite horrifying muddle in case handling, quite apart from the actual conduct of the deportation to be.

I must declare my interest as a member of the recently formed soft power Select Committee, which is due to report to the House later this year or next year. When I was director of public relations for the Army, my job was to protect and project the Army’s image. Our national immigration policy should have both those same intents in mind. The National Security Council reports on border issues every year, and I am sure that the national security protection work of the National Crime Agency and the Border Policing Command will come under its regular scrutiny. The Select Committee has also learnt that the National Security Council is responsible for the co-ordination of the projection of soft power. If it, too, already has those, why should it not exercise them more?

Immigration controls are an essential ingredient of national security. In the past, however, too many involved in exercising those controls have seen them as a process and an end in themselves which they have not related to wider implications. I am very glad that maximum use of technology and intelligence is being made, because this is the key to tackling a whole range of border security checks. I welcome introductions such as the immigration and asylum biometric system. However, at that heart of all that are people. We must be concerned about the people who use and interpret the technology, not the technology itself. There are currently 17 agencies working to secure our borders, which is far too many, not least because there is a lack of clarity over who is actually in command of them and to whom they are responsible and accountable, collectively and individually.

Earlier in the year, the Home Secretary reorganised what used to be called the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, so famously dismissed by John Reid as not fit for purpose, which is now called the UK Border Agency. As I understand it, the outside structure, if that is the right term, is now to be the Border Policing Command, within the National Crime Agency, which will be the national lead for border security and will oversee a single intelligence picture, co-ordinate and task other agencies involved in border security and work with overseas partners to disrupt early those who pose a threat to border security. Secondly, there will be a border force that will concentrate on screening and managing all goods and passengers arriving in the United Kingdom.

Within the Home Office, there will be an immigration and visa service and a law enforcement service, each with its own director-general, who will be a member of an oversight board, chaired by the Permanent Secretary, whose membership will also include policy, the passport service and the border force. In announcing the new organisation, the Home Secretary said that she was doing this because the UK Border Agency was too big, lacked a clear culture, lacked transparency and accountability, lacked adequate information technology and was subject to a complex policy and legal framework.

If the UK is to project what the Home Secretary wants, which is a culture of customer satisfaction among businessmen and legal visitors, it is absolutely essential that our immigration controls are seen as being focused on national security and are not seen by potential international clients as an excessively bureaucratic and intimidatory ordeal to be undergone before doing business with, studying in or visiting this country. It is essential that the officials responsible for such aspects as student and business visas are continually reminded of how their attitude and efficiency rebound on our national reputation. I have been very struck by the volume and strength of complaint made by witnesses to our Select Committee about this. If it results in the falling off of either business activity, which affects our economy, or of student numbers, which affects both our economy and our influence in the world, it could be said to be damaging to our long-term security.

Therefore, while I am sure that the proposals announced by the Home Secretary have the potential to be an improvement on what was in existence until March, I fear that they were based on an incomplete and in-house assessment of the main problem. True economic migration needs to be limited, as does the abuse of student and family visas. However, every aspect of immigration control is ultimately dictated by national security and so the whole system, particularly if it currently includes 17 agencies, needs to be reformed with a view to making it more accountable and transparent.

I am very glad that the role of the independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency is to be increased. I pay tribute to the present holder of the appointment, John Vine, whose reports are always penetrating, constructive and worth reading. I would rather that his independence was marked by him being a Crown official, and therefore Her Majesty’s chief inspector, because that extra degree of independence is always useful when dealing with myriad different agencies. Who, for example, is responsible and accountable for the non-circulation of and failure to act upon alerts produced by the National Border Targeting Centre, an organisation that hopes to cover every arrival in the United Kingdom by 2014 and which the Home Affairs Select Committee, whose continuing focus on the failings of the UKBA is to be warmly applauded, recommends should be accountable to Parliament?

There have been, and are, many concerns about the way in which immigration controls are themselves controlled and conducted. There are too many of them for anyone concerned with national security to be comfortable with. The internal reforms announced by the Home Office are good, but only in part. I would feel much happier if the National Security Council, responsible for protecting the security and projecting the image of the nation, were to institute an outside examination of the immigration system, rather than rely on a series of in-house palliatives, to ensure that this nation is protected and its image projected in the way we would wish.