Immigration: Eurostar

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I declare an interest, having been through the tunnel over 1,500 times, getting to work here and going home again, and indeed having lived to tell the tale. The Minister said that the Government would be trying to set up a system whereby the border agency’s immigration controls would be conducted in Brussels. He must be aware that this system works extremely well in Paris; it saves a lot of time and there is absolutely no delay arriving in St Pancras. I hope that he will look into this and tell us what the problem is. They are very friendly people. This morning when I came through I was asked by the immigration officer what I was planning to do with the House of Lords Reform Bill. I declined to share my views with him, in the same way that at the moment I decline to share my views with the House on that question.

[Lord Henley]

I commend the noble Lord on his diligence in attending this House and the frequency with which he has come through the tunnel. The system in Brussels works pretty well for most trains, in that most people go through the appropriate border security checks. The problem is that a number of people use Brussels to Lille as a commuter line rather than what it was originally designed for, a Brussels to London line. Those people are exempted from going through passport checks by the Brussels authorities and we cannot order them so to do; that is under EU rules. We therefore had to seek with Eurostar some solution to that problem, which does not arise in the case of those coming from Paris. There is similarly not a problem coming from London because, as the noble Lord knows, we do not allow people to use London to Ashford as a commuter route. It is the use of Brussels to Lille as a commuter route on that service that causes the problem.