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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

12 July 2007

The big row over Britain’s border controls burst out again this week when it emerged that Muktar Ibrahim, the leader of the 21/7 bomb plotters was allowed to leave the country and visit a jihadi training camp in Pakistan when still on police bail.

Our opposition critics and the media are quite rightly asking why he wasn’t detained and they go on to say that if our borders were more secure he would have been apprehended and the bomb plot might have been revealed earlier.

One of the reasons why it’s so difficult for our border control officers to make better checks on people leaving the country is that the routine embarkation checks which used to be made were wound down by the Conservative Government in 1994 and abandoned by Labour in 1998.

We shouldn’t attach too much blame to either Party because the embarkation system at that time was failing to cope with the rising number of travellers and it was a purely paper based exercise. Even at those air and seaports where passport numbers were being collected, the mammoth task of checking them manually against the wanted list made the system impractical and unsustainable.

However, the introduction of digitally coded passports and the advances in information technology allows a fast and effective way of conducting arrival and embarkation checks and the new system – known as e-borders – is already operating in pilot form. Within three years e-borders will be rolled out across the country we will have the capacity to identify everyone entering and leaving the UK .

Alongside these reforms, the introduction of biometric ID Cards, the refocusing of the Home Office and the expansion of our security service will all serve to strengthen our border controls and improve this country’s security.

David Cameron says that our borders are porous, he says that our Immigration, Customs and Special Branch Officers don’t co-operate sufficiently and his remedy is to restructure the staff of all three groupings into a single Border Control Agency. He offered this suggestion at Prime Ministers Questions last week and Gordon Brown didn’t dismiss it out of hand – but I do.

During my 28 years living in Dover and during the 12 years I sailed out of the port I’ve had lots of contact with my friends in the various agencies who help guard our borders and it’s only fair to say that their relationships with one another were not always harmonious.

I can remember a time when there was very little love lost between Immigration, Customs, Special Branch and the Port Police and lack of information sharing did little to enhance the efficiency of any of those agencies but times have changed and today joint working and integrated processing is commonplace.

I’m not aware of any of the agencies or many of the employees recommending that restructuring would improve their effectiveness and with all the heightened threats to security we are experiencing – do we really want to risk the damaging disruption that such a radical reorganisation would cause ?