Viscount Goschen (Con)

My Lords, I also commend the Government on bringing forward this suite of amendments. My remarks will follow and parallel quite closely those of my noble friend Lord Harper. This is a very difficult area of the law. Social media and the internet are very fast-evolving and extremely difficult to define. So the approach that the Government have taken recognises that this is essentially criminals advertising criminal services—theirs over the next gang’s—and it ought to be addressed. We ought to focus on it, for two reasons. The first is to try to tackle the individuals and organisations behind these activities. The second is to try to get them taken down as soon as possible. We know that is extremely tough to achieve—we have seen it in other pieces of legislation—but that does not mean that we should not try. I certainly think we should. I am also with my noble friend Lord Harper on his applying a modicum of pressure on the Government by asking how effective they believe these provisions would be. When I asked that very question on a previous amendment, I was given an answer which essentially said, “Well, even if they save one crime, that’s good enough”. The Government should really come forward with a slightly more comprehensive argument. Although, on this suite of amendments, I am less bothered by that, because it is perfectly obvious that what we are talking about here is a large-scale, international, very sophisticated criminal enterprise. One of the things we have not talked about that much in the House during the passage of this important Bill is the fact that people coming here through these means are very often paying very considerable sums of money indeed: these are not trivial sums. We tend to lump people into groups or buckets and forget that they are often making a very conscious choice, looking at the price and the chance of being either diverted or sent back when they arrive in the UK. From the information that the Minister provided to me by way of a letter, we know that the chances of being removed are around 4%— there is a 96% chance of being successful in remaining—so we have a huge prize for people who wish to come to the country through illegal means and we need to do everything possible to disrupt that. So I hope the Government have got more or less the right approach and I wish them every good fortune in the effectiveness of those amendments.