Immigration: Eurostar

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I will make sure that a reply comes to the noble Baroness in due course. Obviously, we continue to negotiate on these matters with Eurostar. I should point out that Eurostar is a private company and we cannot order it to close the so-called Lille loophole with which we are trying to deal. Certainly, we will try to get to other matters and will negotiate accordingly.

[Lord Bradshaw]

Will the Minister turn his mind to the situation developing as regards trains from Germany which stop at several places before going into the tunnel? The same problem that applies to Lille will apply to a lot of other stations on the continent. Better arrangements need to be made.

[Lord Henley]

I am very grateful to my noble friend for raising that point. I understand that the German railways are already planning this and that there might be services from late 2015, so we have some time. He is right to point to the problems because of the confines of the concourse at St Pancras and other places, and the need to make sure that we can sort this matter out in the country of origin. That is relatively easy when you are talking about Brussels, Lille and London. It is considerably harder in the case of trains coming from a number of different stations in Germany. At that point different options will have to be looked at, but we have at least three years to do so.