Border Checks Summer 2011

Brandon Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

If Government Back Benchers want to declaim their support for the pilot, I will happily allow them to do so.

[Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)]

I appreciate the right hon. Lady’s generosity in giving way again. Does what she has said about 2006 mean that she agrees with the mea culpa—I think that was the phrase—of the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee when he said that the problem started under her Labour Government?

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree that Labour Home Secretaries were right to increase the controls and to increase new technology, which is why I am so shocked that Conservative Ministers and the Conservative party are so enthusiastic about rolling back those border checks now. We have seen that the scale of the cuts is putting pressure on the UK Border Agency just as the scale of cuts to policing is putting pressure on community safety. People across the country fear that corners are being cut and that border security is being put at risk by the scale of the Government’s border cuts. This needs to be sorted out. We have had the embarrassing spectacle of a Home Secretary who does not know what she agreed to, how it was being implemented or how great the security risks were.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alan Johnson]

I do confirm that. The Home Secretary talked about Sangatte on Monday, and it was my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) who, in an incredible piece of political acumen, did a deal with Sarkozy effectively to move our border from Dover to northern France. That made a huge contribution as well. I find it incredible that the Home Secretary formulated and introduced plans to reduce the crucial biometric checks while the threat level was at its second highest; it was at severe at the time, and it was lowered to substantial only in July. In effect, she turned the UK into a semi-Schengen country by not requiring full checks on EEA citizens.

[Brandon Lewis]

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned dynamite. I wonder whether he thinks that one of those pieces of dynamite might be the almost half a million unsolved asylum cases that his Government left in a warehouse when the present Government came in?

[Alan Johnson]

If it is, it will go right back to when Willie Whitelaw was the Home Secretary—[Interruption.] “Ah!” they say. I can tell hon. Members why they say “Ah!”. It is because they do not know—[Interruption.]