UK Border Agency

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, who is one of this House’s treasures, for not only prompting a debate of exceptional power and authority but speaking so forcefully on so many of the shortcomings of the border agency. I want to focus on another.

At 6 pm on 14 January this year, I landed with my wife at terminal 4 of Heathrow after a very long flight from India. I was shocked as I came close to the border controls to see the longest queue that I have ever seen anywhere, probably 300 to 400 metres long. I am tempted to say it was longer, but that was my estimate at the time. As it was terminal 4, it contained predominantly people from the subcontinent, including a great number of families, many with young children, and 17 desks at border control were unmanned. I subsequently put down a Written Question asking the border agency to identify or estimate the average time in that queue. The agency came back with the suggestion that it was one hour and 40 minutes. I am sure that estimate was given in good faith but I am deeply sceptical of it. I myself, along with my wife, was in the UK nationals queue, which was very much shorter, but we still had to wait something like thirty or forty minutes before being let through. Even if it was only one hour and 40 minutes, that is far too long for people who have been on such a long flight and then find themselves on arrival in such horrible conditions.

I have travelled, and still travel, a great deal, either on business or for pleasure. I travel in the developed and developing world and have sometimes, as I am sure many of your Lordships have, faced queues in other countries, particularly in America. However, generally speaking, border controls the world over increasingly allow speedy and efficient entry. I have never seen, anywhere in the world, queues to rival those that are now commonplace at London Heathrow and which I saw that evening. This is profoundly unwelcoming and uncivilised. We all know and understand that it is damaging to the UK’s reputation and our national interest, not least because of its impact on potential investors in the UK economy, many of whom I regularly meet in my work and for whom London Heathrow is now a watchword for a torrid experience.

After I got through passport control on 14 January, I asked to see the officer in charge, who was not close to the desks but buried somewhere in the offices at the back. I questioned him about the reasons for this intolerable queue. He of course answered that he had insufficient resources to man the many empty desks and also told me that he thought the matter was only going to get a lot worse. Other noble Lords have mentioned the border agency’s own reports, from which we know that 5,200 staff are to be dropped in the next four years.

I recognise and support the Government’s drive to reduce public spending and the deficit. As somebody who has managed in the public sector, I do not for one moment underestimate the enormous complexity of the task that the border agency faces, which has been exceptionally clear throughout this debate. Implementing government policies in all the areas we have been discussing—security, immigration and asylum—is not trivial. These are very difficult and complex challenges. Many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, and the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Ramsbotham, gave us some very tough reminders of how important it is for the border agency to get so many things right to maintain our civilised standards with respect to the tortured and the brutally oppressed, to safeguard the vibrancy of our education system and to husband and develop the skills of the UK workforce.

I am also someone who has had to reduce costs at many points in his life, both in the public and private sectors, in a variety of organisations, and I am not one who assumes that increasing costs is necessarily the answer to all the challenges that we have heard about during this debate. However, in respect of Heathrow, is the Minister satisfied that the agency deploys its resources optimally? One obvious thing to note about international travel is that it is very data-rich. We know where the airplanes come from, how many people are in them and when they are going to land. It must be possible to give very precise estimates of the flow of passengers through an airline terminal. Is he satisfied that we have such accurate forecasts of passenger numbers? Is he satisfied that we can flex what capacity the agency has to varying demand? Are the working arrangements of the staff in the agency sufficiently flexible? Can they be shifted easily on the basis of need from location to location? Can they be rostered flexibly? Are there enough part-time staff to deal with the inevitable peaks?

If the agency is underresourced, and it may be, it must, like all organisations, cut costs in ways which create, not destroy, value and which are hard-headed about priorities—we have heard many of those in the course of this long debate. There can be no excuse at all for the UK having the longest airport queues in the world. It is a national shame.