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

31 January 2008

When I first came to Dover – nearly thirty years ago I was employed by Sealink on the Calais run. In those days we had quite a bit of contact with our friends in Customs and occasional involvement with the Immigration Officers but to a large extent, they got on with their jobs and we with ours. The same sort of separation existed between customs and immigration which is odd when you consider how much overlap existed between the two services.

When I was elected in 1997 I made many official visits to the Port of Dover and it was clear that there was still a reluctance from the two categories of officer to work together. But in recent years all this changed and I witnessed much more co-operation taking place between the services.

This co-operation has now evolved into integrated working practices and on Tuesday I joined the Minister of State, Liam Byrne for another visit to the port in order to observe the current practice and flag-up the Government’s plans to merge Customs and Immigration into a single Border Force and provide front line staff with police powers.

A lot of work has already gone into this merger project and it’s on target to be rolled out in Dover and other sea and airports in the second week of April. There’s nearly always a resistance to change and some employees will be apprehensive about being absorbed into the new Border Force but everyone I talked to was supportive of the reforms and some were positively enthusiastic for the changes to come in.

As well as all these front line measures being adopted at the ports an awful lot of other work is being done to bolster our borders and discourage the abuse of our immigration laws. This month the Home Office has completed its program of requiring finger prints to be taken for everyone applying for a visa to visit the UK and by the end of the year we will start issuing compulsory biometric ID cards to all foreign nationals.

We will also be introducing stiff fines for employers who take on illegal immigrants without properly checking their status and we will be activating new powers to automatically deport foreign national prisoners.

During our visit to Eastern Docks the Minister and I were shown some of the recent drug finds including nearly 100 kilos of cocaine which – we were told – could fetch up to £4 million on the streets. Some clever detective work by Customs Officers revealed the drugs hidden below an ingeniously constructed false bottom of a Polish freight trailer which had been shipped from Calais.

The days of the random search are largely over and the successes of the Dover operation are mostly down to the careful use of intelligence and the screening of targeted profiles. It’s a highly sophisticated operation and it’s very effective – but it will be even more effective under the auspices of a single border force.