Thursday 10 November 2011
|
|
Thursday 10 November 2011 |
The history of the UK Border Agency is a litany of chaos. Five years after John Reid's criticism, Britain's immigration system is still not fit for purpose The most secure border crossing in the world can probably be found at Panmunjom, between North and South Korea. The only meeting point across a mine-studded demilitarised zone, it is heavily fortified on both sides. Aside from the occasional political prisoner and diplomat, the only people to cross this border are tourists. They do this by moving from one side to the other of one of the five small huts that stand on the dividing line, and are occasionally used for meetings. Then, perhaps after taking a photograph, they go back to the side (South) whence they came. This is what a fully secure border looks like.
In the freer, more reasonable world, the line between one country and another will inevitably be more porous. But the allegation that the UK Border Agency (UKBA) has been quietly operating in a "light-touch" fashion, allowing an almost unmonitored flow of human traffic into this country, is deeply concerning.
A system which functions at varying levels of thoroughness is not necessarily an ineffective one and it is not practical that everybody passing through a border should face the same checks. Customs officials, for example, rarely have the time to search every traveller. Searching the right number, however, affects the behaviour of everybody .
The worry about the system at our borders is that it does not necessarily appear to have been working like this, or even working at all.
Periodically allowing passengers to pass without rigorous checks might make sense, not least at a time when budget cuts have lowered staff levels. Doing so in a predictable fashion when borders are at their busiest, as has been alleged, makes no sense at all. If this was, indeed, a sensible, rigorous and pragmatic system run on limited resources, then one has to wonder why Brodie Clark, the director of border control, was suspended on Thursday, and why the system was immediately abandoned as soon as he had gone. In the absence of an explanation as to this otherwise remarkable coincidence, one can only hypothesise some connection and a summer of chaos.
The details of this latest burst of disarray are muddy. In June, a decision was made by the Home Office to relax checks on UK and European biometric passport holders entering Britain. This occurred with the approval of Theresa May, the Home Secretary, but without even the knowledge of David Cameron, the Prime Minister. Thereafter, apparently without ministerial approval, this relaxation was extended to immigrants from elsewhere. It is this extension which, it is thought, has led to the suspension of Mr Brodie and two senior colleagues.
Many questions must now be answered, and chief among them is whether the much-vaunted introduction of biometric passports was worth the expense, given the UK's apparent inability, five years later, to treat them any differently from their paper predecessors.
More pressing, however, is the culture of chaos at UKBA. This is not a failure which has occurred in a vacuum. It is a whole five years since John Reid, then Home Secretary, described Britain's immigration department as "not fit for purpose". The UKBA, formed in 2008 to put this right, has instead continued the chaos by another name.
Last week it was revealed that the number of immigrants and asylum seekers "lost" by the agency had tripled in the six months between March and September, and now accounts for a population the size of Cambridge.
Ms May is the Home Secretary of a Government which talks tough on illegal immigration. "Together we will reclaim our borders and send illegal immigrants home," Mr Cameron said in a speech only a month ago. It is not only unavoidable cuts which make this harder, but entirely avoidable incompetence, too.