Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

My Lords, I am grateful for the broad support of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Lochiel, for the principle behind the order. I am grateful for his generous support for the direction of travel that we are undertaking. He has asked two specific questions, which I will try to answer for him. On the ETA scheme, we are increasing the fee maximum to £20, rising from £16. As he said, that is an increase of around 25%. Moving from £16 to £20 will put us in line with the American fee and the pending European fee. In general terms, it is a reasonable amount of resource. The noble Lord asked whether that will have an impact on tourism, particularly in Northern Ireland. Last week, I answered questions in the House on the Northern Ireland ETA. We have had discussions with the Northern Ireland tourist board to look at the impact of that, because many people enter the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland via planes to Dublin from America or other ports. We discussed that in detail. We are introducing ETAs in Northern Ireland to enhance our ability to screen travellers upstream. People who arrive in the United Kingdom, including those travelling from Ireland into Northern Ireland, will need an ETA, in line with the UK’s immigration framework. I genuinely do not believe that a £20 fee is going to deter someone from visiting the great city of Belfast, the Mountains of Mourne or the Giant’s Causeway, or, in a wider UK context, from visiting London and seeing all the sites that we have here. It is a reasonable fee for people entering to pay. Although it is a higher fee than the 6.5% general fee, it is a reasonable fee and it brings us in line with other partners. The noble Lord asked the perfectly legitimate question of what happens to the money that the Home Office makes on the application fees. The Home Office does not make any profit from the fees, in line with the charging principles set out in the Immigration Act 2014. Fees for immigration and nationality services are set in consideration of the costs of processing an application, the wider costs of running the migration and border system, and the benefits enjoyed by successful applicants. Any income from the fees set above the costs of processing goes towards funding the wider immigration system. The noble Lord will know that, in the past year, we have put additional staff into processing asylum claims and into border control. Through the then immigration Bill, on which the noble Lord gratefully served and offered good scrutiny, we have established a new border command and new border scrutiny. We have put in place the work that we are doing with the French, the Belgians and the Dutch on border control. We have done the work with Germany. We have passed the immigration Act. All of that is still a cost to the system, and any surplus made from the application fees will go towards that and stop us having to have recourse to the Treasury for additional funding. The Home Office believes that it is right that a greater share of the cost of operating the system is borne by the applicants who directly use it, rather than funding being provided additionally through HM Treasury from general taxation. The figure mentioned by the noble Lord is a considerable sum of resource. That will be used entirely within the Home Office for funding what will be, I hope, a strong and important immigration system.