Border Checks Summer 2011

Debate between Tristram Hunt and Yvette Cooper

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree that Labour Home Secretaries were right to increase the controls and to increase new technology, which is why I am so shocked that Conservative Ministers and the Conservative party are so enthusiastic about rolling back those border checks now. We have seen that the scale of the cuts is putting pressure on the UK Border Agency just as the scale of cuts to policing is putting pressure on community safety. People across the country fear that corners are being cut and that border security is being put at risk by the scale of the Government’s border cuts. This needs to be sorted out. We have had the embarrassing spectacle of a Home Secretary who does not know what she agreed to, how it was being implemented or how great the security risks were.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a question not simply of cuts, but of competence. Whether with Building Schools for the Future or the selling off of forests, this Government are simply not fit for purpose.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. The most shocking thing of all is that the Government do not seem to know what has been happening on their watch.

Time and again, Ministers have blamed the previous Labour Government and civil servants, but the Home Secretary might want to think back to “Question Time” in 2004 and a debate with the then Immigration Minister, Beverley Hughes. The current Home Secretary said at that time that she found it

“absolutely extraordinary that she’s…blamed officials in her department for this decision to be taken…I’m sick and tired of government ministers…who simply blame other people when things go wrong.”

Indeed, Home Secretary.

The House does not expect the Home Secretary to know every detail of what is going on in the agencies for which she is responsible all the time, but we expect her to get on top of things and to sort them out when they go wrong.

Five days on, the public still do not know what on earth has been going on in the Home Office and at our borders. Time and again, this Home Secretary has not been on top of the facts and has not taken action to sort things out. She seems to be making things worse.

We cannot afford a Home Secretary who cannot cope with a crisis or sort out a fiasco. Border security and public safety are too important for us to have a Home Secretary whose authority is continually being sapped. She cannot blame the previous Government and she cannot blame officials. It is her watch. She needs to provide the facts that she has been unable to provide so far and to provide the answers, and she needs to do so today.