Immigration Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-01
Topic: Immigration
Richard Keen (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Lord. As he indicated, Amendment 194 would remove the ability for immigration officers to seek an all premises warrant where they have a power to enter and search premises for material which is likely to be relevant evidence of an immigration offence under the 1971 Act. As the noble Lord anticipated, one purpose of this is to bring the provisions on such warrants into line with those for police warrants under PACE In addition, Amendment 201 is intended to do the same thing, but I should perhaps explain that when the immigration warrants were originally provided for, as running for one month, that was in parallel with the time that a police warrant would run under PACE. Subsequently, the warrant under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was extended to a three-month period, so they fell out of sequence. The difficulty is that, from time to time, there are joint immigration officer and police operations which involve warrants being granted, and it is not convenient that the immigration warrant should be a period of one month while the police warrant is for a period of three months. The purpose of Amendment 201 in particular is simply to bring the time limit back into line with that which applies for police warrants Coming back to Amendment 194 and the use of all premises warrants, it is considered appropriate that an all premises warrant should be available to immigration officers, not only because that is consistent with the form of warrant available to police officers pursuing their own powers but because there are many circumstances in which an all premises warrant will be required for effective recovery of material pertaining to either illegal working or potential offences in respect of landlords and illegal renting. For example, where you have someone who has a number of restaurants employing persons who may be suspected of being illegal immigrants, you may have a warrant in respect of particular premises and then discover that all the records are actually kept elsewhere—in an office, a lock-up, or something of that kind. Therefore, it is appropriate that all the premises that are subject to the control of a particular employer should be available under the warrant, otherwise we would have a very long, drawn-out, step-by-step process of knocking down one domino, going from one warrant to the next one, and so on. It is in these circumstances that it is considered appropriate that an all premises warrant should be allowed in the case of immigration officers. I hope that that addresses the concerns or reservations expressed by reference to Amendments 194 and 201. In a sense, they bring immigration warrants into line with police warrants, but they were in line with police warrants before the amendment to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. In addition, there are substantive reasons why it is practical and effective for immigration officers to have an all premises warrant facility available to them. Government Amendments 195 to 200 and 202 to 209 may look rather complex, but have at their core a very simple proposition; that is, in Scotland it is not lawfully possible to secure an all premises warrant and a multiple entry warrant. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that immigration officers operating in Scotland do so within the bounds of the Scottish criminal justice system.