Owen Smith
Main Page: Owen Smith (Labour - Pontypridd)Department Debates - View all Owen Smith's debates with the Home Office
(13 years ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Damian Green
The definition is a flight that is not a scheduled flight. The number of airports that they fly into is in the hundreds, because frankly anyone who puts up a windsock in a field can have a private airport, but the number regularly used for private flights is between 100 and 150. The biggest usage of private flights is into our biggest airports, because most of them tend to be business flights.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
The Minister keeps reassuring us that the system he has put in place is now safer, but UKBA staff are clearly not reassured of that, because one e-mail from them states:
“we are not allowed to physically see the passengers…we have no way of checking whether the handling agent information is correct or even if the number of people arriving…matches the number we have been advised.”
How, in that case, can the Minister tell us that he knows who is arriving and exactly how many people are on the incoming planes?
Damian Green
Because we are working much better than ever before with airports overseas, so we can check who is getting on the planes in the first place. As I keep repeating, it is better to do that overseas than to wait until people are in this country.