Member

However, there is another reason that this needs to be amended, and that is because that Explanatory Memorandum sits there now for all time. If it is not corrected—for those of us who have actually read the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee report—in years to come, people looking at it will read it and not understand that this mistake was first discovered in 2008. That is absolutely clear; the Home Office is not quite sure how long it was there before that. We have had six Governments of all political persuasions overseeing immigration from 2008, but nothing happened. Was that because papers that were shown to the 2008 Minister—assuming that they were—presumably were not shown to the incoming coalition Government in 2010, and therefore Ministers after 2008 were just not aware of the problem? It would be interesting to hear from the Opposition Front Bench whether the former Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Murray—was aware of this problem.