Border Checks Summer 2011

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes with concern the significant reduction in the level of security and border checks at UK ports of entry in the summer of 2011; and calls on the Government to publish immediately all relevant Home Office submissions to Ministers, together with the instructions from Home Office Ministers to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) regarding passport checks in the summer of 2011 and the relevant operational instructions from UKBA executives to staff and all data collected by the UKBA on the level of checks at each port of entry since July 2011.

We have called this Opposition day debate to discuss the events in border control this summer, because Parliament and the public need answers. I am sorry that more Cabinet Ministers have not joined us for the debate, because this borders fiasco is now escalating. The Home Secretary did not answer all the questions put to her on Monday, she could not answer all those from the Home Affairs Select Committee today, and she and her Immigration Minister are refusing to do television, radio or newspaper interviews on the subject. However, she cannot hide on the important issue of border control. Answers are needed, and her account of what led to the weakening of border controls this summer is now at odds not just with the memos from the UK Border Agency, but with the account of one of her most senior officials, Brodie Clark.

The public need the truth, so let us be clear about the information that the Home Secretary needs to provide. Most importantly, we still need to know the scale of the security breaches that have taken place. Does the Home Secretary yet have any estimate of how many people were affected by the weakening of border controls? The Prime Minister could not tell us today.

On Monday the Home Secretary told us that she was concerned about the routine removal of checks for EU citizens, the suspension of the watch list in Calais and the suspension of fingerprinting non-EU citizens on top of the removal of watch list checks for children, which she authorised. Border agencies have told us of repeated cases in which adults did not have their passports swiped at all, along with no checks against the watch list, not just at Calais but at other ports. The Home Secretary needs to tell us whether that happened.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

Before I give way to Back Benchers, I should like to offer the Home Secretary the opportunity to intervene and tell us whether watch lists were relaxed—[Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The debate is going to continue, so everybody can listen to the debate, and if the right hon. Lady wishes to give way she will do so. We do not need people to keep coming up, one after another.

[Yvette Cooper]

I should like to give the Home Secretary the opportunity to clarify quickly whether the watch list was relaxed at any ports of entry other than Calais.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has not intervened, so let me give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Alok Sharma]

Listening to the tone of the right hon. Lady’s opening comments, one would almost think that her party had left immigration in absolutely perfect order. Let me remind her that it left a system which her own Home Secretary at the time said was “not fit for purpose”, with a backlog of 450,000 asylum cases, and that Lord Glasman, her own colleague, said:

“Labour lied…about…immigration and the extent of illegal”—[Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. The House will come to order on both sides, and if we are going to have interventions they must be much shorter and we must not make speeches. That will come later.

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharman) has obviously got himself into a Whips-induced lather, but if he is concerned about asylum cases he may want to ask the Home Secretary about the 100,000 cases that have now been written off, as identified in the Home Affairs Committee report.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I am a representative of Dover. This issue is a key concern to my constituents, as is Brodie Clark’s statement that such controls had been relaxed since about 2008-09. Who authorised that relaxation?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman, as a representative of Dover, will I know be concerned by the removal of the watch list checks in Calais. Like him, I certainly look forward to Brodie Clark’s evidence to the Home Affairs Committee next week. I am not sure whether the Home Secretary will be looking forward to his evidence in quite the same way, but I am sure that he will set out at that point—

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. In view of the fact that the Government deliberately took an hour away from this time-limited debate with a statement that could easily have been made yesterday, will you make it difficult for hon. Members reading out Whips’ questions to intervene on my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Sir Gerald knows as well as I do that that is not a point of order. He has certainly made the point that people were upset by the statement, but it is for the Government to decide the business of the House, and they control the business of the House. I have certainly already recommended shorter interventions, however, and I am sure that that will have been taken on board.

[Yvette Cooper]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

The Home Secretary has still not told us the extent of the reduction in border checks throughout the country. She said on Monday that she had no clue how many people walked into the country under reduced checks. On Monday, she did not even know which airports were covered by her pilot projects and her decisions. Yesterday she told the Select Committee that she knew which airports were covered in theory, but she had no idea which ones had taken up her pilot project.

Data exist, however. According to the internal e-mails that I have seen, downgrading checks to level 2 is recorded by terminals. Indeed, one would expect it to be. How could the so-called pilots be monitored if the data were not being collected on what was happening? So, does the Home Secretary have those data? Can she tell us now how many times checks were downgraded at how many airports since her decision in July? Has she even asked to see those data, and if she has not, why on earth not? What have this Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister been up to?

If the Home Secretary does have access to the data and has seen the figures on the number of times that checks were downgraded to level 2, will she step up to the Dispatch Box now and tell us what the data say? The public have a right to know what the downgrade in security was this summer. Again, we hear a deafening silence from the Home Secretary. Again, we do not know what data were collected.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that he shares my concern that we still do not have any clear data on the way in which border security checks were downgraded this summer.

[Robert Halfon]

I have just a simple question for the right hon. Lady. How many people entered the UK without being checked against the warnings index between 2008 and 2010?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman’s constituents will want to know what is happening now, and what happened this summer. His Government and his Home Secretary cannot answer the questions. They cannot even tell us more about the pilots, or the decisions they thought they were taking—what they thought they were signing up to.

We know that the Home Secretary thought that in theory her pilot covered European citizens, but in practice it routinely did so. That is a funny definition of a pilot. It was not just one Thursday afternoon a month in Luton; it was every airport and potentially every European citizen. Millions of them entered Britain this summer, and they formed the majority of foreign citizens entering the country, so how many of them missed the full checks? How many of them did the Home Secretary expect to face reduced checks when she gave the go-ahead for this so-called pilot earlier this year?

We know, too, from the UK Border Agency’s internal minutes this summer that there was a reference to

“mixed views on the summer pressures work, including the concern that not checking children on the watch list may facilitate child trafficking”.

Officials raised that concern within the UKBA, and I raised it with the Home Secretary on Monday. She will know that the House has repeatedly expressed deep concern about people trafficking across Europe, so did she even consider those risks before she took her decision?

The intention of Labour Ministers and, I had always understood, Conservative Ministers, too, was to strengthen our border checks year on year. We all agree that there were difficulties in the past, but I thought that we all agreed, too, on the remedy—that we should roll out e-Borders, biometrics and new technology; make sure that enough staff were in place so that we could increase checks and cover everybody properly by counting people in and out; and every year extend the technology and strengthen the checks.

This Home Secretary and this Home Office made a conscious decision to turn the clock back and to reduce the checks. What they put in place this summer was a new regime of lower not higher checks, using less rather than more technology.

[Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman if he can tell me whether he believes we should strengthen and extend biometric tests, rather than reduce them.

[Sajid Javid]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. In 2008, the then Government reduced warnings index checks on European economic area nationals, children and adults, on Eurostar services, and they did so on 100 separate occasions between 2008 and 2010. She was a senior member of the previous Government, so can she tell the House whether she supported that measure?

[Yvette Cooper]

I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman needs to understand that biometric checks increased every year under the Labour Government; his Government have undermined them and rolled them back. What is the point of Britain investing loads of money in biometric technology and passports, if we then switch off the system every time a European citizen goes through it? What on earth is the point of that investment, which our Government supported and were extending and rolling out, but which the hon. Gentleman’s party and his Government seem to have backed off from and ditched, undermining the border controls that are in place?

[Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. We are listening with great interest to her rewriting of history. Does she not agree that the Government of whom she was a member left the system in a real mess? This Government are trying to improve things and clear up the problem.

[Yvette Cooper]

If this is what the hon. Gentleman calls improving things—dearie me. We should be strengthening controls. Those controls had been strengthened, year on year, but in my view they should have gone further. We should be doing more to roll out e-Borders and extend biometrics. He does not seem to realise that his Home Secretary removed the biometric checks. She has been undermining many of the checks that should have been taking place.

Secondly, we need to know who authorised what, because serious allegations have now been made, both by the Home Secretary against a senior civil servant and by a senior civil servant against the Home Secretary. Her advisers seem to have briefed the newspapers that Brodie Clark was a rogue official. She told the House that he had taken responsibility and that she would make sure that “those responsible are punished”. He has said that her statements were wrong. The Home Secretary has a history of high-level spats, but this is considerably more serious than a political row over immigration and the future of cats; this is a dispute over the security of our borders. We need to know what advice she was given. What were the precise terms of the pilots that she signed off? What was communicated to the UK Border Agency about her decision? Was the memo—which I know she is aware of—from the Border Agency saying that it would cease routine biometric checks of EU citizens cleared by her, the Minister for Immigration or Home Office officials? Is it an accurate or inaccurate reflection of the instructions that were sent out from her office, or the description of the pilot in the submission that she received and signed off?

[Matthew Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

Again, I notice that the Home Secretary is silent, so I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Matthew Hancock]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. However, she has not yet mentioned the fact that Rob Whiteman, Mr Clark’s boss, has said that Mr Clark overstepped and did more than was authorised by Ministers. That is why he had to be suspended.

[Yvette Cooper]

We now have different accounts from different officials, the Home Secretary and the memos from the Border Agency that have been revealed. What the public want to know is the truth. That is why we need the information to be published. We need to know what information the Home Secretary gave to the Border Agency, what instructions were given to the Border Agency and what instructions were given by the Minister for Immigration. What information was provided to Ministers from the Border Agency? What monitoring did they ask for? What monitoring did her Minister for Immigration do? By the way, it is good to see him here today. He has been completely silent and absent from this entire debate. Indeed, in the light of these revelations, we wonder what job he is in fact doing. What information did either Minister ask for when they decided to extend the pilot just six weeks ago?

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

Is it not crucial that we know Mr Clark’s version of events? We look forward to his giving evidence next Tuesday, because so far we have simply had the Home Secretary. Why should a senior civil servant of 40 years standing wish to mislead us or give a wrong impression to Parliament?

[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.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

This is a pilot that covered millions of people over many months and has led to Home Secretary being unable to tell us how many people have wrongly been allowed into this country as a result.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

If Government Back Benchers want to declaim their support for the pilot, I will happily allow them to do so.

[Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)]

I appreciate the right hon. Lady’s generosity in giving way again. Does what she has said about 2006 mean that she agrees with the mea culpa—I think that was the phrase—of the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee when he said that the problem started under her Labour Government?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

The operational instruction did reflect Government policy because it allowed for a risk-based assessment when opening the biometric chip of EEA passports and checking EEA national children against the warnings index when they were travelling with parents or as part of a school party.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has just made an extremely important statement. She said that the UK Border Agency’s interim operational instruction did reflect Government policy. That operational instruction says

“We will cease:

Routinely opening the chip within EEA passports.

Routinely checking all EEA nationals under 18 years against the Warnings index” .

If that is Government policy, it is little wonder that, across the country, people have been routinely stopping doing the biometric checks in EU passports and stopping doing the watch index checks. The instruction does not say “Only in exceptional or limited circumstances”. It says “We will cease routinely” to do those checks.

[Mrs May]

The whole point is that they were allowed, in certain circumstances, not to open the chip—[Interruption.] The whole point is that they were allowed, in certain circumstances, not to check children against the warnings index. And the whole point is that officers were allowed to exercise their discretion.

Where the instruction says that officers should escalate further measures, it refers of course to the warnings index checking policy put in place in 2007 under the Government of which the right hon. Lady was a member. I have to tell the right hon. Lady that the quotes she has been eagerly e-mailing around the Lobby come from a policy put in place by her own Government.

The right hon. Lady referred to staff numbers. What she failed to tell the House was that in April 2010 the Labour Government had already announced that they would cut the budget and the staff of the UK Border Agency.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has not answered an extremely important question. She has accused officials of going much further, of using routinely the reduced checks that she wanted in only limited circumstances. That is one of her main allegations—officials going further than her decision and her advice. The interim operational instruction that the Home Secretary says reflects Government policy and was her intention is described as “Trial of risk-based processes at the border,” and states:

“We will... Cease routinely opening the chip within EEA passports.”

The document goes on to talk about discretion, but the discretion is to go further, not to cease the process only in limited circumstances. Will the right hon. Lady now recognise that the document shows that her intention and her policy were substantially to expand the reduction of checks for EEA citizens across the country and to reduce controls at our border?

[Mrs May]

I answered that point on Monday, on Tuesday and this afternoon. The right hon. Lady knows full well what was in the pilot I authorised.

The right hon. Lady asked what information was given to Ministers when we decided to extend the pilot programme. As I told the Select Committee yesterday, Ministers were provided with four updates on the progress of the pilot prior to the agreement to extend it. The updates provided information about seizures of drugs and detection of illegal immigrants. They did not refer to unauthorised actions; in fact, they explicitly said that officials were sticking to the terms of the pilot and not going beyond them.

The right hon. Lady asked about child trafficking. I answered that question on Monday in the House and before the Home Affairs Committee yesterday. For the information of the House, in 2010, 8 million EEA-national children were checked against the warnings index. An alert came up for one child, and after further questioning the child was allowed in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Green]

I know how strongly the hon. Gentleman feels about the Larne and Stranraer issue, but it is not an international port. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom; boats that come from Northern Ireland to Scotland are not crossing an international boundary. That is a fact that the hon. Gentleman needs to recognise.

The pilot was designed to improve security at our ports and to strengthen our border. Several Opposition Members said they believed that it was not being monitored and that no information was being passed to the Home Secretary or me during the course of the pilot, but of course that was not the case. We were getting regular information from management about what was happening, and it was telling us that there was a 10% increase in the detection of illegal immigrants, a 48% increase in fraudulent documents detected, and that cocaine seizures and illegal firearms seizures were up.

[Yvette Cooper]

rose—

[Damian Green]

Before I give way to the right hon. Lady, will she answer the following question? If the figures for the pilot had gone the other way—if detections were down, the number of fraudulent documents detected were down, and drug seizures were down—would she not be calling for a debate to argue that the pilot was a failure? Why is she calling a debate now when, as far as we can see, this pilot was a success?

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

If the hon. Gentleman’s pilot was such a success, he will need to explain why he has now suspended it. There is an important question that the Home Secretary ducked earlier about the management data that were available—I refer to the information about how many times the checks were downgraded to level 2. How many times did that take place over the summer? Has the Minister seen that information? If so, will he publish it? We know that the information exists.

[Damian Green]

That is precisely the information that the various investigations are looking at, but what the right hon. Lady has to recognise is that, without the authorisation of Ministers, senior UK border officials are alleged to have ordered the regular relaxation of border checks. They also went beyond the pilot that Ministers had agreed. Biometric checks on European economic area nationals and warnings index checks on EEA national children were abandoned on a regular basis, without approval, and adults were not checked against the warnings index at Calais, without approval.

What the pilot was designed to do—I hope that there will be some consensus on this across the House—was to have a risk-based approach. I say that there should be some consensus, because having a proper risk-based approach to immigration control has been the basis of our policy on both immigration and wider security since 9/11. I was grateful for the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) on that point. It is obviously sensible to concentrate our effort and resources in those areas where they are likely to have most effect on making our borders safe. I cannot believe that there is a Member in any part of this House who disagrees with that. That is what we approved.

On the point about queues which was raised by several hon. Members, including the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins), there is of course permanent pressure for shorter queues; there is pressure from Members of this House. I have to tell the right hon. Gentleman that whenever I come back in the autumn—I suspect this was the case for any previous Immigration Minister—I hear tales of woe about queues at Heathrow, but it is absolutely the first responsibility of the Home Office to make sure that we do not compromise security. That is what this pilot—that is what a risk-based approach—is designed to do.

What happened that went beyond authority was that the verification of the fingerprints of non-EEA nationals from countries that require a visa was stopped on regular occasions, without approval.