Border Checks Summer 2011

Margot James Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right: we need to hear Brodie Clark’s evidence to the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which will be important. However, we also need to know what it says in the instructions that the Home Secretary’s office gave to the Border Agency. That by itself should clear a lot of this up. What did she decide? What were her instructions to the Border Agency? Has it accurately reflected those instructions or not? She should publish that information and those data. Let us get to the bottom of what has been going on.

Thirdly, the Home Secretary needs to provide us with more information and assurances about resources. It is clear from the internal memo and from the Border Agency that staff were under pressure. One internal management e-mail says:

“If we aren’t using level 2”—

the reduced level of checks—

“the assumption is we won’t be using secondary staff to support any pressures…as you know, this is a message we have put out time and time again…We cannot continue to pull resources from other parts of our business when we are not making use of all the tools available to us”.

In other words, the Border Agency was not allowed to ask for extra staff when things got busy unless it had already downgraded to a lower level of checks.

People do not like queues when they come back from holiday—the kids are crying, it is very stressful, or perhaps they are late for a business meeting—but they stand there, looking at all the empty booths, and thinking, “Why aren’t the extra staff put on? Why aren’t the extra lines open?” Now we know the answer: because the Border Agency has been told that it has to cut the checks that are in place. Some 6,500 staff are going from the Border Agency, with 1,500 going from the border force, including more than 800 this year alone. The Prime Minister told the House with great pride that the level of staff was returning to the level of 2006. Really? I have to say that I do not think that border controls were strong enough in 2006. We were right to strengthen them and to keep strengthening them. [Interruption.] If Government Members really want to roll back the clock and reduce the checks and border controls that are in place across this country, they are completely out of touch with their constituents across the country, who want to see proper immigration controls in place.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Lady think that the border controls were ever strict enough under the last Government? Let me tell her that my constituents will never forgive that Government for letting in 2.2 million people, a population twice that of our nearest city, Birmingham.

[Yvette Cooper]

It was right to increase and strengthen those border controls and to increase biometric checks. However, if the hon. Lady wants to intervene again, I have to ask her: does she agree with the pilot that her Home Secretary introduced, which reduced those biometric checks and removed checks against the watch list for EU children?

[Margot James]

I will not presume to comment on the decisions that the Home Secretary made, but I will say this. It was quite—[Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The House must come to order. We want to hear the interventions as well as the speeches.

[Margot James]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It was quite reasonable to assume that a pilot should be undertaken in the European economic area, such that not everybody was subjected to the same tests as those identified as being in a high-risk group. I do not see why anyone should argue with that decision.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I am not knocking the Minister for Immigration—poor chap, he does what he is left to do—but the fact is that this arrogant and indolent Home Secretary will not touch immigration and because of that she does not know what goes on at the ports, she does not know what goes on in the immigration departments, and she does not know what goes on in Islamabad, Dubai or Abu Dhabi. That is because she does not care; she thinks she is too important to deal with the nuts and bolts of administration. My right hon. Friends the Members for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) and for Blackburn (Mr Straw), both former Home Secretaries who have spoken in this debate, did do that. They were ready to listen and to look at the nuts and bolts. That is what is wrong with her. I say again that it is her arrogance and her indolence that have made this possible.

[Margot James]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I support the pilot scheme that was introduced in just a limited area across the European Community. I have read about the Home Secretary’s approach to this. It was first put to her back in April this year. She approached her decision with characteristic caution. She requested more information, particularly from security advisers, and she was given the all-clear by those security advisers that in the pilot, under strictly limited conditions—limited in scope and in geographical area—the UK Border Agency could relax some of the restrictions that hon. Members have already mentioned.

[Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Bradford South) (Lab)]

But if the hon. Lady is right and the Home Secretary had those concerns at the start of the pilot, the very least I would have expected the right hon. Lady to do was to say to her Immigration Minister, “Watch this, because this could cause serious problems.” Is the hon. Lady not surprised that the Home Secretary never did that?

[Margot James]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I believe the Home Secretary did just as he suggests. It is my understanding, and I am sure that in the winding-up speech we will hear for sure, that the Home Secretary asked the Immigration Minister to keep a close eye on the operation. We should not forget that although it was put to the Home Secretary back in April, the operation did not even start till July this year. We are only in the second week of November, and it has already come to light that things have gone wrong. The media and the Opposition are a little too hasty in coming to such a swift judgment on a pilot that has barely been completed and that the Home Secretary has suspended.

The Home Secretary then decided to allow a limited pilot to be run. It is clear from the limited information we have so far that on several occasions the head of the UK border force authorised staff to go beyond the pilot approved by Ministers. The pilot had been running for only the best part of three months, during which time excesses were agreed by managers on the ground. It might have come to light before now, but as soon as it did come to light the Home Secretary took the right decision by suspending the pilot. The decision to suspend the head of the UK border force was taken by the chief executive of the UKBA, not the Home Secretary. I fail to see why there has been such criticism of her for a decision that was taken in a proper manner by someone else.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

The hon. Lady says the Home Secretary did not ask for Mr Clark’s resignation, but in her statement the right hon. Lady basically blamed him for everything that went wrong. By doing so, she has prejudiced any inquiry that could be carried out. Surely it would have been better, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) suggested, to keep to the tradition of Sir Patrick Mayhew and carry out an inquiry to find out what went wrong before blaming an individual with 44 years of service at the highest level. That is why the Home Secretary is wrong.

[Margot James]

No one fired the individual concerned. There was a resignation following a suspension, and my understanding is that the suspension was not ordered by the Home Secretary. It was immediately instituted because the individual admitted to varying the terms of the pilot.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has long experience in business, which she could perhaps use to compare the suspension of Mr Clark by the UKBA with the sacking, live on television, of Sharon Shoesmith by the current shadow Chancellor.

[Margot James]

My hon. Friend makes an insightful observation, and one that I trust Opposition Members will learn from.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

rose—

[Margot James]

I will not give way again, as many other Members wish to speak.

I will conclude my remarks by expressing my astonishment, which I am sure many of my constituents share, that Labour Members have sought in such an opportunistic fashion to capitalise on this media storm. Have they no shame? They have proposed this motion in the aftermath of more than 10 years of open and porous borders and what was effectively an amnesty for illegal immigrants. This Government inherited a 450,000 backlog of asylum cases. The Labour party seemed to have a deliberate policy when in power to increase dramatically the number of eastern European workers coming into the country by making Britain one of only two EU member states that did not introduce transitional controls. It was an outrage when seven years ago the then Home Secretary said on television that he expected 70,000 to come from eastern Europe without introducing those transitional controls. There have been allegations that the Labour party deliberately encouraged the policy of mass immigration so as fundamentally to change British society and boost the economy in a completely unsustainable way.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Margot James]

I will not give way, as my time is running out. I apologise to my hon. Friend.

No one voted for the fundamental change brought about in our country over the past 10 years. The Labour party should be doing time for the fraud it served on the British public, rather than seizing the first media storm to challenge the new Government’s commitment to the truly Herculean task of addressing the dire straits into which our immigration system fell when Labour was in power.