UK Border Agency

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Commons Chamber

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

Today we have had a statement made rather in haste by the Home Secretary after yesterday’s major speech from the Prime Minister barely mentioned these reforms. Only after the Prime Minister’s speech was dismissed in the media as “smoke and mirrors”, as “unravelling” and as allowing “politics to trump policy” and only after yesterday’s damning report from the Home Affairs Committee on the effectiveness of the UK Border Agency has the Home Secretary suddenly decided to rush this statement out before the Easter recess.

The Home Secretary is right that action is needed to sort out problems at UKBA, which has had a series of problems over many years. We would have some sympathy with her proposals, but the problem is that she refuses to recognise that problems with enforcement and effectiveness at UKBA have got worse, not better on her watch. Enforcement has got worse, visa delays have got worse and 50% fewer people are being refused entry at ports and borders. She says that the number of illegal immigrants removed does not keep up with the number who are here illegally, but that is because she is letting rather more of them in. The number of people absconding through Heathrow passport control has trebled and the number being caught afterwards has halved on her watch.

We have had a 16% drop in the number of foreign prisoners deported, we have had a big drop in the number of employers being fined for employing illegal workers, and what is her remedy today? She plans to split UKBA into two different organisations. We have been here before. She has already split UKBA once: just 12 months ago she split it into the Border Agency and the Border Force and made a lot of promises. The Minister for Immigration would like us to believe that it has all gone hunky dory and that things are much better since then, but what has happened since last year’s split? Queues at the borders went up and the Border Force presided over some of the longest queues our airports have seen, with people waiting more than two hours to get their passports checked.

Things got worse at the Border Agency, too. The Select Committee’s report showed a 20% increase in the backlog of asylum cases in three months, a 53% increase in number of asylum cases waiting more than six months compared with the previous year, an increase in delays for tier 1 and tier 4 in-country visa applications compared with the previous three months and 59,000 cases not even entered on the database. As the Committee said, 28,000 visa applications were not processed on time in one three-month period—that is two thirds of visa applications not processed on time. In the words of the Committee:

“The Agency must explain to Parliament what has gone wrong throughout 2012”.

The Home Secretary’s reforms and her cuts are what have gone wrong throughout 2012, so why should we believe that the latest round of reforms will do any better?

The Home Secretary has cut UKBA’s budget by 34% since the election, so little wonder it is struggling to keep up. Will she answer the following questions? When will the reforms be completed and how much they will cost? Her last reforms to split the Border Force and the Border Agency cost money rather than saving money. How many more illegal migrants will be deported as a result of the reforms? The figure has dropped by 20% since the election. How much will it increase by as a result of the reforms? How long will legitimate migrants have to wait for their visas? Will those delays be cut or will they increase? How long will the waits on asylum claims be? There was a 50% increase in long waits last year. What will she get that down to? These are the practical questions to which we want answers.

So far under this Home Secretary, the only strategy we have had for border control has been cuts and cuts, splits and splits. But performance has got worse. When she was in opposition, she said to a former Immigration Minister:

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

So, will she recognise the things that have gone wrong since the election on her watch and give us practical information about and targets for putting them right and tell us what the improvements in performance will be?

We have had a lot of rhetoric on immigration from the Home Secretary but—this is really important—we need her to get the basics right and to do it now.