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

10 September 2009

Last week, Keith Vaz, who Chairs our Home Affairs Select Committee, accepted my invitation to visit the Port of Dover to hear from Dover Harbour Board and the ferry companies about the almost insurmountable problems posed by plans to introduce the Government’s e-borders regime. I also wanted to show him Calais.

The e-borders system will provide electronic means of counting and recording everyone who comes into and leaves the country. There’s general support for the regime and the model being developed for the airports is close to becoming a practical and do-able system. Unfortunately, that can’t be said for our sea ports and it’s especially unsuited to busy ferry ports like Dover.

Most of the information to be gathered can be obtained by the swiping of people’s passport data which is not a great burden for the airline industry as they deal with individual passengers.

The problems start when an operator has to gather data from multiple passengers passing though our ports in cars and in coaches and I’m afraid the UK Border Agency (UKBA) still don’t appreciate the difficulties and delays their current e-borders model would have.

Hopefully, our Home Affairs Committee will persuade the Government to bang some heads together at UKBA.

After our tour of Eastern Docks we took the ferry to Calais to be shown the juxtaposed border controls in the Port of Calais.

During my last visit in 2008, I witnessed Border Agency staff discovering eight Afghanis in the back of a Polish HGV, we didn’t see any discoveries being made this time but we were told that forty young men had been detected and detained in the last 24 hours and a total of 28,000 were discovered and handed over to the French police last year.

The good news is that nearly all those clandestines apprehended on the French side of the Channel would – without our juxtaposed controls – have found their way to Dover and would have entered into the torturous asylum procedures with all the problems and difficulties we’ve seen in the past.

The bad news is that those handed to the Calais police are released after processing and allowed to return to the so-called jungles, giving them the opportunity to try their luck again and again, and it was to the biggest of the five jungles, where the Afghanis stay, that we went next.

The young men were friendly and quite happy to talk to us but they told very much the same tale I’ve heard on earlier visits to other jungles in Calais.

They say they’ve paid up to £10,000 to traffickers to get to France and they are ready to pay extra to get across the Channel because many have friends and relations here, many can speak a little English and most have been told – wrongly – that they’ll be granted asylum and allowed to work.

During our stay we talked to UN and immigration officials, local charities and the British Ambassador. They all agreed the Calais situation was a complex multi dimensional problem – but no one offered any easy answers.