Ivory Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Henry Smith and Baroness Hayman of Ullock

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th June 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Sue Hayman (Workington) (Lab)]

Q 57 How do the two different roles that you have interact, and how do the two organisations work? How are your resources at the moment? Do you have sufficient resources should the Bill become law? Would you need any further training or resources, and what impact would that have on your current roles?

Grant Miller: Our roles are quite distinct, which allows us to work hand in glove. The Border Force role is to disrupt the illegal trade—import/export—and trans-shipment of ivory through the UK. Our focus is largely on the export of our historically held ivory, which is traded over online auction houses and is then shipped predominantly to China and Hong Kong, but there is an emerging market in Vietnam for those goods as well. Border Force no longer has an investigation function; we hand all our intelligence from investigations to the National Wildlife Crime Unit with a view to it investigating those offences. So they are very much clear roles that allow us to work in partnership.

With regard to resources in Border Force, we have a dedicated unit that has been established for 30 years now and a team that is regarded as probably one of the best in the world at enforcing controls against the illegal wildlife trade. It is a team of 10 staff with national responsibility. We are, however, supported by every other uniformed Border Force officer, who has a basic level of skill in being able to identify animal and plant products.

Like every law enforcement manager, we could always use more resources and could always deliver more. However, what a small, highly focused team with clear objectives gives us is an easily moveable unit to actually address the changing risk. It allows us to be a lot more dynamic in addressing the risk and very flexible in moving from postal to air to maritime environments. At the moment, against the Border Force control strategy, our resourcing is adequate to control the threat.

Chief Inspector Hubble: When Border Force makes seizures of items being exported from the UK, it passes that intelligence to us. We collate that intelligence, develop it and research it to look at the number of items that people might be buying, selling or trading. We look at their associates. We try to map a network of people that they are linked in with, and ultimately we produce an intelligence package that goes out to a police force in the area where the person is committing the offences.

We have four officers who provide an investigative function to support police forces on the ground, and they work with police officers throughout the investigation: taking statements from witnesses, linking in with experts, compiling prosecution files, assisting with search warrants, and attending court to provide evidence. Due to our limited resource, we have to be really selective in what we deal with, so the number of investigations that we get where people are trading at a lower level would generally be sent to local policing to deal with. As a national unit, our focus has to be on those who are trading more and more products. Ultimately, that is where we can make a difference, linking in with the bigger players and those trading internationally.

One seizure by Border Force can result in months and months of investigation for us, and we can compile hundreds of intelligence logs from that one investigation. At the moment, we struggle to disseminate all that intelligence back out to Border Force, to close that loop, because we just do not have the resource to develop that. We have to be selective in what we deal with, but we certainly support Border Force in the work we all do on a day-to-day basis, and we welcome the introduction of the Bill.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Q There are other jurisdictions around the world where there have been ivory bans. What sort of best practice do you feel can be gleaned from those other places—the United States perhaps most notably? What lessons do you think we can learn and apply when this legislation is passed for the UK?

Grant Miller: Chief Inspector Hubble and I were fortunate last year to do a training mission in South Africa for seven sub-Saharan Africans, in conjunction with the Chinese CITES management authority. During that workshop, the Chinese presented their comparative interpretation of the US ban and the Chinese ban and of the impact of these. It became evident that their view was that the Chinese ban was far more robust and had delivered closure of the trade. They felt that the US ban had left so many exemptions that the trade was allowed to continue despite there being a ban. If you accept their argument, we would like to see enforcement having to allow as few exemptions as possible so that the ban is, in reality, a ban on the ivory.