UK Border Agency to be split in two

 Alan Travis, home affairs editor 

 

 

 

 

 

The UK Border Agency is to be split in two after an official inquiry report found that poor communication, poor oversight and confusion among ministers and senior officials lay at the heart of last summer's border checks fiasco.

The report into the Brodie Clark affair finds that the immigration minister, Damian Green, gave the go-ahead for the suspension of the key checks on overseas passengers with biometric visas from outside the European Union before last year's Easter holiday.

But the inquiry by John Vine, the chief inspector of the UKBA, also finds that the border force, then headed by Clark, continued with the regular suspension of these passport checks even after the home secretary had specifically excluded them from being lifted to cope with massive queues at Heathrow and other ports.

The report reveals that other passport checks have been relaxed without ministerial authorisation on a far wider scale in recent years than had previously been made public.

Vine says it is "of considerable concern" that checks against the warning index of potential terrorists and illegal migrants have not been carried out on more than half a million low-risk European economic area nationals who have travelled to the UK on Eurostar services from Disneyland and other French resorts since 2007.

He also discloses a "potentially unlawful" measure known as Operation Savant to manage student numbers at peak times, under which overseas students were admitted to the UK even though they did not have necessary entrance clearance documents.

The report also reveals that a pilot scheme for a risk-based approach to passport checks which had been authorised by ministers has not been the success that was claimed by David Cameron in the Commons. Instead, Vine says it is not possible to quantify whether it has been a success or a failure.

The report follows the dismissal of Clark last November after being accused of being a "rogue civil servant" for lifting passport checks without ministerial authority to cope with passenger numbers.

The home secretary, Theresa May, reacted to the highly-critical report by announcing a decision to split the UK border force from the UK border agency from next month. She said it needed a new management culture and to become a "disciplined law enforcement organisation," led by a director general reporting directly to ministers. Brian Moore, chief constable of Wiltshire, is to be its interim head.

She told MPs that suspensions such as the Eurostar or student checks were unauthorised by ministers and said that such decisions went back to 2007, when Labour was in power.

But the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the report showed that passport checks had been downgraded more than 2,000 times after it was decided to weaken border controls. "The report shows that instructions from the home secretary's office were unclear, whilst the immigration minister authorised relaxed checks in January 2011 without asking the home secretary which were then implemented in by the UKBA," Cooper said.

"The home secretary is trying to claim that the problems at the UKBA have nothing to do with her, the immigration minister or her so called pilots. Yet the report shows the opposite.

"It makes clear that controls were downgraded far more often in 2011 than in any previous year, and that the immigration minister licensed repeated weakening of border controls."

The Vine report says there is now an urgent need for a new framework for border security checks, which allows for their suspension where necessary based on risk or health and safety to cope with passenger numbers.

He says communication between the UKBA and ministers was poor. Green thought he had only given "provisional" approval to the decision to relax secure identity checks on overseas visa nationals arriving at Heathrow, but the inquiry found it was reasonable for the agency to assume the go-ahead had been given.

Vine says he found it was a lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities and a lack of clarity about language by ministers and senior officials that led to widespread confusion among frontline staff.

It also highlights a "summer pressures" submission by Clark to the home secretary asking to relax border checks, which was linked a cut of 600 staff with the problems of handling last summer's holiday surge in passengers through UK airports.