UK Border Agency

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

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

I thank the Home Secretary for early sight of her statement, in which she makes important points about the fiascos at our border last summer, but it does not cover everything in the report from John Vine. In less than the hour that we have had to look at the report, we have found that it says something very different from the points that the Home Secretary has made.

For example, on the watch index checks from Calais, the Home Secretary’s statement today gives the House reason to believe that the problems had been going on since 2007. In fact, the watch index checks were suspended zero times in 2007, zero times in 2008, six times in 2009, 33 times in 2010 and 50 times in the first nine months of 2011. The report states:

“Although the figure for 2011 only covered nine months to the end of September, this represented a 51% increase over the previous year. The Agency should assess whether this increase can be attributed to changes in port infrastructure, increases in passenger numbers, a reduction in staff or a combination of all three.”

So the clear suggestion in the report is that a lack of staff may have increased the problems at the UK Border Agency in the past year, but the Home Secretary in her statement to Parliament has hidden that information.

On secure ID, the report states that it was suspended 482 times under this Government. The Immigration Minister approved the reduction in secure ID checks as part of the risk-based approach in January 2011, and again the Home Secretary has not explained how far Ministers’ authorisation, even if provisional, contributed to the downgrading of secure ID checks.

On the Immigration Minister’s further agreement to proposals, the report quotes the former head of the Border Force, who said:

“The Immigration Minister was clear that this did not require Home Secretary sign-off and he had followed up with a note stating that we should progress with the implementation.”

Time and again the Home Secretary has not set out the full information in the report.

On the level 2 pilots, the report is clear that they were downgraded over 2,000 times. That is not occasional, or under the “limited circumstances” that the Home Secretary told us about last year.

We have asked the Home Secretary before about the operational instruction that states:

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

She told the House on 9 November 2011 that that operational instruction did reflect Government policy, and that is the very guidance that led to checks being downgraded 2,000 times, for hours at a time, covering huge numbers of people.

On page 12, the report states:

“We found that the language used in both the ‘Summer pressures’ submission to Ministers and the response provided, was not clear and as a result was open to misinterpretation… For example, the written response from the Home Secretary’s office said that ‘the change in checks should not be a routine measure but only used when the queues get beyond a reasonable length.’ As the key terms were not clearly defined, we found this had been interpreted and operated in different ways at different ports.”

The report is clear:

“Given the importance of decisions to suspend border security checks, it is imperative that the language used is absolutely clear and unambiguous.”

Clearly, the language from the Home Secretary’s private office was not clear and unambiguous, and that led to huge confusion in the Border Force across the country.

There is no evidence in the report of proper monitoring by Ministers. It is scathing about the way in which checks were downgraded and talks about unauthorised activity. Why on earth were Ministers not asking for information and not properly monitoring the pilot that they had authorised and introduced? One of the updates, which it appears did not go to Ministers, makes it clear that secure ID was suspended as part of the checks over the summer. Why did that update not go to Ministers and why did they not ask for that information? Why did they accept only three updates over the course of the summer, when seven were provided? Why were Ministers not visiting the ports to ensure that the pilot that they had introduced was being properly implemented? Ministers decided to roll back the principle that had been in operation for many years—that we should gradually strengthen and tighten our border checks, using new technology and biometrics—and to introduce a huge experiment with border security. They made no proper checks to see what was happening during the fiasco last summer.

Finally, when confronted last November with the problems that had arisen, the Home Secretary told us that

“initial UKBA statistics show an almost 10% increase in the detection of illegal immigrants and a 48% increase in the identification of forged documents compared with the year before.”—[Official Report, 9 November 2011; Vol. 535, c. 318.]

She said that that had happened as a result of her pilots. However, the facts in the report show something very different. The Heathrow data alone show that the number of people refused entry was more than 100 lower each month—not higher—compared with 2010. The official statistics show a 10% drop in the number of non-asylum seekers who were stopped at ports compared with the previous year. Will the Home Secretary take this opportunity to apologise to the House for giving it premature and inaccurate information about the supposed success of her pilots, when clearly they were a huge failure in controlling the border?

The Home Secretary told us that her pilots did not weaken border security. The report states that

“it is not possible to quantify the extent of the risk that these measures presented to the border.”

The implications of that for our border are very serious, yet the Home Secretary continues to hide. She has hidden behind a report and not set out its full consequences, just as she has blamed officials, hidden from the media and hidden behind spurious statistics. In opposition, she said of a former Immigration Minister:

“I’m sick and tired of…government ministers…who simply blame other people when things go wrong.”

That is what she is doing now. It is time for her to stop hiding and to take responsibility for things that have happened on her watch: the unclear instructions from her office, the policy decisions to downgrade our border controls, the failure to monitor and check what was going on, and her failure to take responsibility. This mess escalated on her watch with every month that went by. Unless she accepts responsibility for this fiasco, she will fail to sort it out and she will fail to reassure the House that she can cope with future fiascos and that she is the Home Secretary to keep our borders secure.

[Mrs May]

The shadow Home Secretary’s mock outrage would have rather greater credibility if she had shown any real interest in immigration or border control at any stage over the year for which she has been doing her job. I remind her that the Vine report states that security checks have been suspended without ministerial authorisation since at least 2007. The suspension of checks of which I told the House in November happened without ministerial authorisation, and that unauthorised suspension had nothing to do with the pilot that I authorised last summer.

The right hon. Lady makes a number of claims in relation to the report. I suggest that she consider her track record on such claims. The Vine report exposes everything that she claimed last November as plain wrong. She said that the pilot was reckless, but the Vine report shows that Labour Ministers approved similar measures. She said that the pilot gave the Border Force the green light to suspend other checks, but the report shows that the suspensions were unauthorised.

The right hon. Lady said that by sometimes suspending warnings index checks on certain children, we risked an increase in trafficking. Not only is that wrong, but the Vine report makes it clear that Labour Ministers approved the suspension of checks on children. She said that we should have known about the unauthorised suspension of checks, but the Vine report makes it clear that information was withheld from Ministers and that unauthorised suspensions have been going on since at least 2007. She repeated that Labour increased checks on passengers and improved security, but the Vine report shows that it did not.

The right hon. Lady mentioned information about what happened during the pilot. I did indeed report figures to the House in November. They were the ones that were available at the time, and I faithfully reported them to the House. Since then, the chief inspector has discovered that unauthorised suspensions were made, so it is not possible to give a full picture of what effect the pilot had. We remain open-minded about risk-based checks, but they must be implemented in a controlled and authorised way.

The right hon. Lady blamed what has happened on cuts. I know that is her Pavlovian response to everything, but I would have thought she had noted that on the second page of the Vine report the chief inspector states that the suspensions were

“affected by a number of factors including…the numbers of staff deployed”—

the numbers deployed, not the numbers employed. As with the police, the right hon. Lady seems to find it very difficult to get her head around that. Just in case she has forgotten, I remind her that the previous Government planned to cut UKBA budgets.

The right hon. Lady talked about information that was available to Ministers about the pilot. I remind her that the Vine report makes it clear that updates to Ministers on the pilot

“were not balanced…presented an inaccurate picture of performance”

and

“could not be relied upon to determine the success or otherwise of Level 2.”

There is nothing more important than the security of our border, so it is a shame that the right hon. Lady has taken the approach that she has and has not addressed the measures that we are undertaking to secure our border and ensure that the Border Force is the law enforcement agency it should be. We did not hear any of her views on the recommendations in the Vine report, the proposal to take the Border Force out of the UKBA or the proposal to change the approach that the Border Force takes, because she has nothing positive to say about immigration or border security.