UK Visas and Immigration

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Steel, for obtaining this debate. I am afraid I have to agree with both speakers that this is a shambles and probably just the tip of the iceberg.

I shall talk about UK immigration problems on the cross-channel rail services. It is worth recalling that the Channel Tunnel was built—I played a small part in it—to create seamless travel to the continent. We have somehow substituted for a physical barrier an administrative blockage which is an absurd obstruction to travel to and from the continent.

Starting 25 years ago, you had the juxtaposition of French or Belgian and British immigration at London, Paris, Lille or Brussels. Sometimes immigration checked passengers on the train coming back into this country. That may be fine for those cities with quite big volumes, but now that the operators want to move to the south of France, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and many stations in between, it just does not work. The latest situation is that if Eurostar is running a train from the south of France, going out it is fine—you can get out of this country all right, for the moment anyway—but coming back the train stops at Lille and everybody has to get out with their suitcases, go upstairs, through security and immigration and back down again. The train leaves an hour later. So many more passengers go out than come in by train, which is no great surprise.

The same will apply to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Cologne, Aachen, Schiphol or wherever we want to go. DB, the German railway, has said that it would like to come to London but it is not going to because it just does not work. That is because, in addition to what I have explained, immigration will not allow you to mix domestic passengers with international passengers. Therefore, if the train is coming from Frankfurt, it cannot carry passengers from Frankfurt to Brussels because they might leave a bomb on the train or have the wrong passport. It is also expected that on every station at which the train stops there should be an immigration officer checking people’s passports, followed by security. What operator is going to fund that? It is totally uneconomic.

The same will apply with HS2. There are supposed to be international services going from places north of London—such as Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Leeds—to Paris perhaps. This will not happen because we will not be allowed to carry domestic and international passengers on the same trains. I can assure noble Lords that there will not be enough people travelling from Birmingham to Paris to fill a complete train—it will need London passengers as well—and I suppose that they will all have to get out at London and go through security and immigration again. This is killing international rail travel. I do not see any way at the moment in which things can change.

I have had several meetings with Ministers. They have been very helpful but they cannot offer any solutions. I have three solutions. The first is very tongue in cheek but it is made on the basis that we will have to be checked going out of the country. I am told that it will be like using an Oyster card, which takes half a second to get through a barrier. A passport check going out will take 12 seconds. Imagine taking 12 seconds to get into Holborn station in the rush hour. The queues will go all the way round the block. We put chips in dogs to make sure that they are rabies-free. Would it not be better if we all had chips and could walk straight through? The Government know everything about us—they spy on our e-mails and so on—so it would not make much difference. So that is my first suggestion. I am not sure that the Minister will accept it but it is always worth a try.

My second suggestion is that we could join Schengen, but, with this Government, that is pie in the sky. The third suggestion is that we check passports on the train. It used to be done, as I have said. I have been told, “Oh, it takes much too long and we cannot get the latest signal that Mr al-Qaeda suddenly might be coming. Five minutes from getting into the tunnel he will get in and claim asylum”. There should be the technology to do this online and on the move reasonably quickly. It is the only thing that will work when coming in and going out. It behoves the Government to develop a system and make it work.

Something needs to be done. The immigration and security services are not achieving anything. Parts of the Conservative Party seem to want total physical as well as economic separation from the continent but, as I have said, it is bad for business and for Britain’s reputation. We must do something about it.