UK Border Agency

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the noble Lord would not want me to speculate on why certain individuals are alleged to have relaxed the rules beyond what the Home Secretary authorised in the pilot. That is the point of the investigation being mounted by John Vine. We look forward to that investigation in due course. I do not accept his second point that we have necessarily to maintain United Kingdom Border Agency staff numbers at the precise level that they have been for some time. The noble Lord will know that the numbers went up quite considerably when the Border Agency was created a few years back with the merger of a number of different agencies. We now have to reduce it in size but we will make sure that staff are deployed in precisely the right manner. That matter, too, will be covered by the investigation.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

Is my noble friend aware that part of the problem of delays, which has been spoken about, is that the biometric machines installed at great expense at our airports, partly in order to speed up the process, in fact take a great deal longer? I speak as a regular weekly commuter and from experience. The technology is so defective that they take much longer than the old manual system. Is he further aware that when I flew into Gatwick last night the biometric machines there were not operating at all? When I asked the border official why they were not working, he said that he did not have a clue.

[Lord Henley]

I take note of what my noble friend has to say. We inherited these machines and will try to make sure they operate as well as we can. Whether it would be right at this stage to spend very large amounts of taxpayers’ money on installing new machines is another matter. Obviously, as my noble friend says, we want to reduce delays, because delays cause major annoyance to a great number of individuals and cause damage to business. We will do what we can. At the same time we need to maintain border security, which is one of the reasons why we want to make sure that biometric details on passports are properly read.