Immigration: Eurostar

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to enable Eurostar to resume regular services between Brussels and Lille while avoiding any delays caused by immigration control being conducted at St Pancras.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)]

My Lords, there has been no suspension of regular Eurostar services between Brussels and London which also stop at Lille. Following misuse of Brussels to Lille tickets by those seeking to avoid UK border checks, Eurostar has restricted the sale of tickets to casual travellers to three trains a day. Only these services are subject to routine immigration checks at St Pancras. We seek to keep delays to a minimum.

[Lord Berkeley]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his response but is he aware that the consequence of all this is that passengers coming into the UK from Brussels, Lille, Disneyland Paris and anywhere except Paris have to queue to get through immigration for between half an hour and one hour at St Pancras? I have queued twice and I saw lots of families travelling from Disneyland Paris, of whom probably 99 per cent were British, having to queue for an hour, which is rather hard on them. Why cannot the immigration service process passports on the train after the passengers have left Lille, as it used to?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, as the noble Lord knows, the ideal would be to process the passports at Brussels, which we try to do for seven of the 10 or 11 trains a day that go from there, stopping at Lille, that do not allow people to buy casual tickets. The noble Lord knows of the so-called Lille loophole, which we want to plug. As he has said, one solution would be to have staff on the train. We believe that that would be unnecessarily expensive and would not be cost-effective. We are talking about only three trains a day being affected by the Lille loophole. We think that we can continue to negotiate with the Brussels authorities to get them to allow us to do all the checks on all the trains, including the three on which casual tickets are allowed to be bought, at Brussels as would be appropriate.