Immigration: Eurostar

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, as the noble Lord knows, the ideal would be to process the passports at Brussels, which we try to do for seven of the 10 or 11 trains a day that go from there, stopping at Lille, that do not allow people to buy casual tickets. The noble Lord knows of the so-called Lille loophole, which we want to plug. As he has said, one solution would be to have staff on the train. We believe that that would be unnecessarily expensive and would not be cost-effective. We are talking about only three trains a day being affected by the Lille loophole. We think that we can continue to negotiate with the Brussels authorities to get them to allow us to do all the checks on all the trains, including the three on which casual tickets are allowed to be bought, at Brussels as would be appropriate.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, has the Minister been able to visit British Transport Police operations at St Pancras to look at what happens in relation to child trafficking? In a recent debate, he indicated that he would like to do so. My noble friend Lady Doocey pointed out that a number of simple steps could be taken to protect unaccompanied children coming into this country, including checks on the identity of such children and on the people collecting them, and a dedicated space on the train. Has he been able to follow any of those up?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I have not yet been able to visit St Pancras but I certainly hope to do so. My noble friend’s question is going slightly wide of the Question on the Order Paper, but it is valuable in that it points to the need not only to maintain appropriate security to provide the proper checks and safeguards for those who potentially are being child trafficked but to be able to do that in as user-friendly a manner as possible so that the complaints to which the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, referred do not happen as well.