Lord Foster of Bath (LD)

My Lords, I am fascinated to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, with the information that he has provided to us today; I very much look forward to the Minister’s response to the points that he made. I shall concentrate on only one very small bit of the statutory instrument before us: the bit that relates to the electronic travel authorisation, or ETA. I serve as the chair of your Lordships’ Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee. We have on a number of occasions looked in a great deal of detail at the planned introduction, and now the actual introduction, of the ETA. It is an authorisation requirement for anybody who does not have a visa and who wants to come here for a short stay from non-visa countries. We welcome the pushing out of the boundaries and the borders that this measure involves, giving us the opportunity to collect information about visitors to our country before they have even arrived, but we have expressed a number of concerns and made a number of recommendations to the Government about it. That is why I am focusing on this one particular issue. What is proposed here is an increase in the maximum fee from £15 to £16, which of course seems incredibly limited; it is a very small increase. However, as the Minister rightly pointed out, the Government have made it absolutely clear that it is their firm intention that, as soon as time allows, another statutory instrument will come along; this one will increase the current fee from £10, as it is now, to a new maximum of £16. Obviously, that is a very significant 160% increase that we are going to see. Bear in mind that, when this measure was introduced, we heard a number of things from the previous Government, who, in fairness, introduced it. In a Written Ministerial Statement of 6 June 2023, the then Minister of State for Immigration, Robert Jenrick, said: “This fee level is competitive with that of equivalent systems run by other countries”,—[Official Report, Commons, 6/6/23; col. 821WS.] so the £10 is a competitively charged amount. Of course, he was absolutely right. Currently, in Israel, it is £5.61; in South Korea, it is £5.53; in New Zealand, it is £7.68; and in the Seychelles, it is £8.33. In Australia, it is free unless you pay roughly £10 to use the smartphone application. All the EU countries are about to introduce their own similar scheme, and they have already announced that that will cost €7. So, clearly, £10 is of an order of magnitude but is actually slightly higher. By the time we get to £16, it is going to be significantly higher. I acknowledge there is one aberration in that: the United States. However, if we look back at its history, it had a very much lower figure for a very long time during the measure’s introduction and it has only just recently increased that. So we will be out of line, when the original plan was to be in line and be competitive with other countries. The question is: will that have an impact? The answer is that the committee is concerned that it will have a significant impact on tourism. To those who think, “Well, what’s the evidence for that?”, I say that we already have some evidence. One of the other things we were concerned about was the original intention for transit passengers to Heathrow and Manchester to have to apply for, and pay for, an ETA; we thought that that would be a disadvantage to Manchester and Heathrow Airports in particular. The current Government have looked at that, and we are pleased that they have decided not to go ahead with it and, temporarily at least, it is not happening.