Border Force

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I know from a conversation we had that he has seen the work that our border officers do in our juxtaposed controls, where attempted illegal entries are prevented from even getting to the United Kingdom. He makes a good point, too, about the rest of the UK Border Agency after the agency’s split into the two component parts of UK visas and immigration and immigration enforcement. It is doing exactly what my right hon. Friend said, which is to welcome those who come to Britain to contribute—skilled workers and students, for example—while deterring those who do not and ensuring that those who overstay their welcome are removed from the country.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

Ministers were right to respond to public concern and the recommendations of the Home Affairs Select Committee by putting in additional staff to check passports, but it appears from this report that that came at the expense of those who should have been checking vehicles and people before they entered the country. Will he confirm whether that was, in fact, the case; and will he further confirm that the legal loophole, mentioned in the report by John Vine, has now been closed? Does he agree that co-operation with our EU partners is essential, given that the UK border is actually the border between Turkey and Greece—that is where illegal migration enters the EU—and that unless the French are prepared to work with us in furthering that co-operation, we will not be able to stop people entering our country?

[Mr Harper]

I welcome the remarks of the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee. He raised three questions, which I shall endeavour to answer. The first was about resources, and given that the checks were not being conducted as they should have been in all cases, it would be fair to say that in responding to the chief inspector’s report and implementing the operating mandate, it was clearly necessary to increase the resources going into the Department. As to whether we have the balance right, it is obviously something that we keep under review, and it is a challenge for all operational managers. I refer back to the National Audit Office’s last report, not the one published today, that looked into our detection and seizure of serious goods—class A drugs, firearms and so forth—that people were attempting to get through the border. The report said that in all those cases we were meeting and exceeding our seizure and detection targets. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I think that we are succeeding.

I do not have time to go in detail into the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the legal loophole, but I can say that we are making considerable progress and that his general point about the importance of partnership working is absolutely true. I recall a visit last autumn when I met the new French Interior Minister, and I visited Calais and Coquelles this summer in order to see for myself the co-operative work going on between the French port authorities and our Border Force officers. Such co-operation is excellent and we need to keep it in that good shape as we go forward.