Kevan Jones
Main Page: Kevan Jones (Labour - North Durham)Department Debates - View all Kevan Jones's debates with the Home Office
(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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Damian Green
The pilot is still being evaluated, but my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has already said that the initial reported information suggests that it led to more interception of illegal immigrants, fraudulent documents, drugs and guns. The initial signs from the management information that we have suggest that the pilot was extremely positive, but there will be a full evaluation and then we will decide what is best to do for the future.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
Further to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) about Durham Tees Valley airport, will the Minister say exactly how many private flights arrived and were not checked? If he does not have that information to hand today, will he publish it?
Damian Green
As I have said several times, every private flight is checked against the warnings index. [Interruption.] The shadow Home Secretary, characteristically chuntering from a sedentary position, as she does throughout, is talking about that happening when flights arrive. It is actually safer to check them before they arrive, and that is what the warnings index is for. All private flights are checked against the warnings index before they arrive, and I tell the right hon. Lady—[Interruption.] I will tell her, if she will stop talking for a second and listen, that it is safer to check them before they arrive. That was why her Government and the current Government spent hundreds of millions of pounds on the e-Borders project—so that we could get the information before people came to this country. That was how we managed to prevent 68,000 people from even getting on planes to come here. If the Opposition Front Benchers cannot understand that stopping people before they arrive here is a better system, I fear that they do not understand the first thing about immigration control.