Draft Immigration (Leave to Enter and Remain) (Amendment) Order 2023

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2023 General Committees

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Ms Elliott, to serve under your chairship.

The Home Office has been using e-passport gates to process passengers at UK airports and juxtaposed controls in France and Belgium since 2008. There are 263 e-gates in use at airports in the UK and at juxtaposed controls, according to the explanatory memorandum published with this order. From 2019, the use of e-gates was extended to nationals of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.

As explained in a January 2022 report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, e-gates

“enable Border Force to process large volumes of ‘low risk’ passengers more quickly and with fewer staff than would be possible via manned immigration control desks. This also makes them attractive to airport operators since queueing times are shorter for arriving passengers.”

The purpose of the order is to enable the Home Office to carry out a limited “proof of concept trial” on the potential reduction of the minimum age for using e-gates from 12 to 10, as the Minister has set out.

The explanatory memorandum says that such a change would be

“in keeping with the Government’s wider ambition of increasing the use of automation (that is, entry to the UK facilitated by technology without manual intervention by a Border Force officer).”

The ICIBI carried out an inspection of the use of e-gates between June 2020 and January 2021. The report was sent to the Home Secretary in June 2021, but it was not published until January 2022. As of January 2023, the ICIBI’s list of live inspections includes

“a re-inspection of ePassport gates”,

but this inspection is currently marked as “paused”, for reasons that are unclear. Perhaps the Minister might want to explain why the reinspection has been paused and give us a sense of how long the pause may last for.

One of the key areas highlighted in the previous ICIBI report was safeguarding. To give some background, in 2017 the Home Office extended the use of e-gates to all children from Britain, the European economic area and Switzerland aged between 12 and 17 if they are accompanied by an adult. Following a review of the original trial, the Home Office found that identifying children

“at risk of trafficking, modern slavery, female genital mutilation, forced marriage and domestic servitude”

was a “challenging” issue for Border Force staff.

The January 2022 ICIBI report stated:

“Concerns have been raised by stakeholders about the Home Office’s ability to identify vulnerable passengers at the gates. Stakeholders told inspectors that the gates make it harder to identify vulnerable passengers.”

The Home Office guidance states that e-gates

“must not be opened or allowed to accept passengers”

without the presence of a monitoring officer, or MO for short, and that the MO should not operate the gates

“for more than 30 minutes of continuous, uninterrupted passenger processing”.

However, the ICIBI found that, in practice,

“this guidance is rarely adhered to”.

Ports with more than five gates should also have a roving officer, an RO, deployed at the gates. Their primary role is

“to prevent trafficking and provide safeguarding assurances by heightening security around the gates.”

According to ICIBI inspectors, these officers

“now have a broader border security role, leaving stakeholders to question whether they are sufficiently resourced to identify child safeguarding concerns and other vulnerable passengers.”

Furthermore, inspectors found that Border Force

“only records the identification of potential victims of modern slavery”

and:

“There is no centrally held record of the identification of other categories of vulnerability.”

The Home Office’s response to the ICIBI said:

“Border Force has a training plan in place, once Coronavirus restrictions impacting some face-to-face training are lifted, to provide further specialist training to both operational managers and our cohort of Safeguarding and Modern Slavery (SAMS) specialists during the remainder of FY 2021/22. Further safeguarding training is in development for all frontline officers with delivery due to commence in 2022.”

The Department added that plans were under way to introduce a new system for electronic recording and monitoring of all incidents where passengers were stopped in relation to safeguarding concerns, and that implementation would take place

“over the course of 2022.”

What progress has been made with those plans, and what assessment have the Minister and his colleagues made of their success?

Further, on security issues, the ICIBI found:

“The UK’s departure from the EU has created a potential new cohort of illegal workers who will continue to enjoy visa-free movement to the UK. The UK has also lost access to EU criminality data systems, creating a risk that high-harm individuals could enter the UK via the gates”.

In the light of those findings, what steps have been taken to ensure that officers have access to all sources of information needed to monitor and track movements of individuals who might pose threats of criminal activity?

[The Chair]

Order. Will the shadow Minister stick to the order, please? He is veering off. This is about lowering the age; be careful.

[Stephen Kinnock]

Sorry, Ms Elliott. I thought safeguarding issues were connected too, and I also take your point on modern slavery, potentially. I am sorry about that.

According to the ICIBI at the time of its inspection, the roll-out of Border Crossing, the Department’s new system for providing the passenger watch list, was well behind the original timetable for roll-out. Will the Minister confirm whether the new system is fully up and running?

As the purpose of the order is to enable the Home Office to carry out a trial of the potential extension of e-gates to 10 and 11-year-olds, does the Department plan to publish full details of that trial once it has reached its conclusion? Can the Minister provide any timescales for the trial and, if appropriate, for the roll-out of the extension once the results of the trial are known? Will he commit to working with independent, third-party inspectors such as the ICIBI and the new Anti-Slavery Commissioner—if the Government ever actually get round to appointing one—to ensure that the highest possible safeguarding standards are built into the systems for operating e-gates?