Immigration (Stranraer/Cairnryan)

Damian Green Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) on securing this debate. I know how strongly he feels and I will deal with the specific matter of the common travel area and Ireland in a minute. However, I must first tell him that it is slightly bizarre for him to say that he was expecting a review, that a review was done by UKBA, and that that somehow had nothing to do with me. I am the Minister responsible for UKBA, so if it does a review, it has something to do with me. That is how these things are done.

[Mr Russell Brown]

Will the Minister give way?

[Damian Green]

I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman overran his time slightly, so I will not be able to take interventions from him—he has had a good go.

As I am sure the hon. Gentleman recognises, and as I need to make explicitly clear, Stranraer and Cairnryan are domestic ports. Those western Scottish sea ports are not designated ports within the meaning of immigration legislation. They are not international ports of entry such as Dover. The ferry routes between Northern Ireland and Scotland are domestic UK services. Legally and in immigration control terms, they are no different from ferry services between the Scottish mainland and the western isles or between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. There are no international passenger services between Stranraer or Cairnryan and any foreign country. We must be clear that we are talking about people moving within the UK; we are not talking about people coming into the UK.

I am sure that, beneath the rhetoric, the hon. Gentleman recognises that it would be wholly inappropriate to introduce passport controls at domestic UK ports. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. Journeys within the United Kingdom are not subject to border controls, and nor should they be. Our intelligence shows that the route is subject to abuse. The UKBA knows that some come here with the intention of flouting the immigration laws, and that those here illegally deliberately move around the UK to avoid detection. That is why we work closely to clamp down on those who come here and abuse the system.

The UKBA works closely with the police in Dumfries and Galloway, and I welcome that close working relationship. The agency is also working closely with the Irish Garda to tackle people who start in the Republic of Ireland and then try to enter Northern Ireland illegally. Relations with the Republic of Ireland are strong. Together we are working to secure and strengthen the whole of the common travel area and to narrow the opportunities to exploit it, as well as reinforcing the excellent co-operation that already exists between the UKBA and the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service in relation to the protection of the common travel area. Of course, I recognise the importance of that, and we are working hard to ensure that the CTA becomes a stronger border area as a whole.

I recognise that we are in difficult economic times and that changes to the structure of the UKBA may have been unwelcome to the hon. Gentleman. His concerns about last year’s decision to remove UKBA police funding to Stranraer and Cairnryan have been noted—he has made them clear in the intervening months—and we appreciate the impact that it has had on the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary. As he made clear, however, that came with a much greater reduction in funding from the Scottish Government of the force’s counter-terrorism work.

Dumfries and Galloway is Scotland’s smallest police force. I know that Chief Constable Pat Shearer has made his concerns public, as the hon. Gentleman said. Pat Shearer said last September that cuts in staff numbers meant that the force was going

“closer and closer to the bone”,

and he believed that there was a limit to how far cuts to the constabulary could go without adversely affecting police performance.

As we all know, policing in Scotland and its funding are devolved matters. The police have a duty to uphold and enforce the law and maintain the peace in Scotland. Dumfries and Galloway constabulary, like other forces across the UK, carries out a range of work, and it is its decision—the chief constable’s decision—how its prioritises and manages that work. The UKBA officials work with it to tackle irregular migration. Like the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary, the UKBA must spend public money carefully. The agency therefore took the decision to realign its deployment of seconded police. That decision affected seconded officers throughout the UK.

It was reasonable for the hon. Gentleman to ask what changed. When the UKBA began funding police officers in Stranraer, it had a limited presence in Northern Ireland. At that time, officers had to be deployed from other areas to conduct operations in Northern Ireland. In July 2009, the agency formed a new local immigration team in Belfast. From its offices in Drumkeen house, the UKBA now conducts a wide range of immigration services. A key part of that is tackling immigration crime. The UKBA therefore has more officers than ever before on the ground in Northern Ireland tackling irregular migrants.

The UKBA operates right across the United Kingdom, so it is right that we consider where best across the UK to place our resources to tackle illegal immigration. Tackling abuse of the immigration system is fundamental to the work of the UKBA, and our enforcement work produces real results. This year, a targeted summer campaign involved more than 600 operations across the country resulting in 557 arrests. Some 65 prosecutions have been initiated so far, and there have been 22 successful prosecutions.

I shall touch on specific examples of immigration enforcement work at the western Scotland and Northern Ireland ports. In September, an immigration fraudster was jailed for 18 months after being caught with a bundle of fake identities. Fayyaz Ahmed was arrested at Belfast docks in February while trying to get on the Belfast-to-Stranraer ferry. He was found to have three computer memory sticks and two mobile phones containing more than 700 false and fraudulently altered identity documents. His case, which involved a sophisticated criminal operation, underlines what we all know: that some migrants will seek to abuse our immigration controls. It also highlights the importance of the work that our team does on the ground in Northern Ireland.

Intelligence shows that the majority of illegal migrant traffic comes from the Republic of Ireland through Northern Ireland, and then on to Scotland. It therefore makes sense to transfer the responsibility for identifying those illegal migrants to the border agency’s local immigration team in Northern Ireland, where UK Border Agency staff replicate the work already done at the Northern Irish airports. The agency has more substantial resources on site in Northern Ireland, which is more conveniently located to service the ports and enable the agency to be more operationally effective. The UK Border Agency’s immigration officers in Northern Ireland therefore check the status of passengers arriving from or leaving for Great Britain, targeting routes shown to be most at risk.

In the medium term, UKBA resources will shoulder more of the work of dealing with immigration offenders using that route, which will ease the pressure on Dumfries and Galloway police. For now, early results suggest that, with appropriate levels of co-operation, smart deployments and an increased ratio of detections by the UKBA in Northern Ireland, further improvements can be made in the detection rates of immigration offenders using the Galloway ports as a transit route between Northern Ireland and Scotland. In the long run, the new arrangements, with more effective controls on those routes, will lead to an overall reduction in immigration arrest rates and minimise the burden on Dumfries and Galloway constabulary. An early review of UKBA operations found that an increasing number of immigration offenders are being detected in Northern Ireland, which happens before they can travel to Scotland by ferry or the rest of the UK by air.

[Mr Brown]

I thank the Minister for giving way, and I wholly agree with him—I have here the UKBA report on the common travel area. Although more effort is being made in Northern Ireland—rightly so, because a commitment was given on that—and although more people are being detected, the reality is that more people are still coming on to the mainland through the Galloway ports. I think I mentioned this earlier, but we have all underestimated how serious the problem is; I hold my hand up to that as well. More needs to be done.

[Damian Green]

Of course, more always needs to be done, on every route. However, what I hope I am explaining to the House and the hon. Gentleman is what is being done and why I believe that the changes being made—which focus the operation more in Northern Ireland, which is the source of the problem in his constituency—are a more effective long-term way of tackling illegal immigration and, as a beneficial side effect, reducing the stress on the Dumfries and Galloway police.

[Mr Dodds]

I am grateful for what the Minister has said about what is being done in Northern Ireland, and he is absolutely right. However, he also said that the source of the problem was Northern Ireland, but is not the real problem people coming in from the Irish Republic? There are checks at the border at the ports and the airports, but what about the illegal immigration into Northern Ireland? What is being done to tackle that problem?

[Damian Green]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly reasonable point. I am in close negotiations with my Irish counterpart to ensure that the common travel area becomes more effective, as I have explained. We need to help the Irish Government to strengthen their border, because, as we are in a common travel area, to some extent their border is obviously our border. The closer we can co-operate and the stronger we can make that border, the better it will be.

Let me demonstrate what has happened. If we look at UKBA work, as seen in the review into working arrangements, we find that impressive results have been produced both in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In just four months—January to April—175 immigration offenders were detected at Northern Irish sea and airports and at west of Scotland sea ports. That is a 200% increase on the same period in 2010, which suggests we are doing much better at getting to the root of the problem.

We have produced and agreed a 10-point plan between the Border Agency and the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary to improve co-ordination and liaison. The plan will cover a wide range of aspects, including the systematic sharing of intelligence, joint tasking and co-ordination of deployments, which optimises coverage at the highest-risk times at Northern Ireland sea ports and reduces the number of immigration offenders who need to be processed by the police in Scotland. Again, that is a double benefit. There are now also monthly operational and quarterly strategic meetings to share results, learn from experiences, identify and introduce best practice, and review the progress of current arrangements. The joint objective over the next six months is to introduce all these measures fully and to refine them, to deliver the majority of detections and detentions in Northern Ireland and to reduce Dumfries and Galloway constabulary time and the work needed to deal with immigration suspects and offenders encountered at the Scottish sea ports.

This debate is particularly timely, as I know that Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Government Cabinet Secretary for Justice chaired a meeting yesterday at the new port of Loch Ryan where he met David Ford, the Northern Ireland Assembly Minister of Justice, as well as representatives of both Scottish and Northern Irish police forces and the regional operation leads from the UKBA. I understand that it was a very constructive meeting, and I think it is important to recognise that the working relationship at the operational level among the Border Agency, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary goes a long way to make our ports an unwelcoming place for criminals.

Of course, all police forces come across illegal immigrants—