Alcohol Strategy

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Friday 23rd March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

This announcement about the alcohol strategy is extremely important, but the way in which it has been done is a complete shambles. It has been rushed out on a Friday morning when many of our colleagues have engagements in their constituencies and without notifying the Select Committee on Home Affairs. So, despite the many pieces of work the Committee has done on this issue, its members do not have the chance to be here in Parliament to scrutinise the strategy.

Why are we debating it today rather than on Monday, as was previously planned? It cannot be to ensure that Parliament hears the details first, because we have had the chance to read them in the Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and all the other newspapers that were given the details yesterday. I even have the press pack, complete with questions and answers, which was given to the media yesterday and not to the House. It includes considerable additional information that has not been given to the House as part of the Home Secretary’s statement today. Nor can the reason be for Parliament to debate the statement, when only two hours’ notice has been given of a statement on a Friday. I take this opportunity, Mr Speaker, to apologise to the students I was due to meet in Pontefract at lunch time and have had to let down. Many of our colleagues will be in the same position.

The only reason we are sitting on Friday is so that the Budget debate could take place today rather than next week, Parliament could finish 10 days early and the Prime Minister would not have to answer Prime Minister’s questions next week. There is no precedent for handling a long-awaited consultation document in this way, on a Friday morning, with no notice. Over the past 10 years, there have been only three Government statements on a Friday: on the Iraq war, on swine flu and on Libya—all of them involving serious issues around national emergencies. What is the national emergency today?

What is the national emergency that prompted a decision to be made late yesterday afternoon to brief an important and serious strategy to the newspapers which meant that a decision was made this morning to interrupt the debate and make an oral statement? The only emergency is that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have gone wobbly over the coverage of their Budget. Their Budget has gone wrong because pensioners are furious about the granny tax, middle earners are shocked to discover they will be paying the higher rate and everyone else is furious that the Government are bringing in a £10,000 tax break for the highest earners in the country, including, we discover, half the Cabinet. This is not about a 40p minimum price; it is about their failings on the 40p tax. The Home Secretary is being used as a human shield for the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, and she should have said no.

The issue is extremely serious. The Home Secretary is right: 1 million violent crimes each year are linked to alcohol. Nearly 9,000 people die each year as a result of alcohol abuse. Many people—indeed, most people—drink moderately and responsibly, and we enjoy it. The Home Secretary is right to say that responsible drinkers should not be penalised, but we cannot stand by and ignore the serious problem of dangerous alcohol abuse. Many policies have been tried already, including linking duty to strength and giving the police stronger powers to clamp down on alcohol-related antisocial behaviour, but she is right: they have not solved the problem.

The Home Secretary is also right to say that more now needs to be done. Many of her policies are sensible and we will support them. I agree that this is the right time to try minimum pricing. There are serious questions that she should answer—and the House should have the opportunity to debate—about how we ensure that supermarkets do not simply get a huge windfall, and what safeguards there should be for pubs. I agree, too, that we should explore the issue of sobriety orders, but these are serious questions that the House should have the chance to debate, to make sure they are not used wrongly for domestic violence cases and do not tackle the seriousness of the abuse.

I agree too that licensing is important. I hope the Home Secretary will now support our proposals to put public health in the terms for licensing decisions. More needs to be done on prevention, which had little mention in the statement—little wonder perhaps, when alcohol education is being watered down in schools. These are all extremely serious issues and we should have the opportunity to debate them properly in Parliament; but we do not have the opportunity for many MPs to ask questions today and to intervene and discuss the issues with the Home Secretary.

Will the Home Secretary tell us when the decision was taken to make the statement today? Will she agree to come back to the House and properly debate the strategy, giving the Home Affairs Committee and others the proper chance to ask questions? Does she agree that she is wrong to treat something so serious in such a cavalier fashion in the announcements made to the House? Does she agree that the Government are wrong to use a serious alcohol strategy as a cover for their chaotic confusion over their dreadful Budget? Will she treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves? We will give it proper support, if she will do so for the future.

[Mrs May]

That was the usual response from the right hon. Lady—bluster and political point scoring. One thing was missing. After the disaster of Labour’s Licensing Act 2003, after election text messages saying, “Couldn’t give a XXXX for closing time,” and after all that drink-fuelled violence and disorder, there was not even a hint of apology from the right hon. Lady.

I suggest that the right hon. Lady speaks to the previous Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), who said that he regrets not doing more during his time in office to tackle the problems caused by binge drinking. It is a shame that she cannot bring herself to be as frank about her party’s record in office.

It was difficult to decipher the right hon. Lady’s questions about the actual statement on alcohol strategy. I think she raised two points. She asked about ensuring that the minimum unit price did not lead to a cash windfall for supermarkets. I do not believe it will, because the supermarket industry is highly competitive; it has small margins on its goods and I expect money made through higher alcohol prices to be passed on through lower prices for other goods. When the cost of living is an issue, I should have thought that the right hon. Lady would welcome that.

The right hon. Lady asked about health bodies. They will of course be in a position to contribute to local licensing decisions; indeed, the new public health and wellbeing bodies will be able to participate, alongside the police and local authorities, in setting strategies to deal with alcohol in their local area. The right hon. Lady now takes an interest in health bodies having a role, although sadly she and her party opposed the Bill that enabled them to be set up.

I recognise that the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, is not in the Chamber, but last year he said:

“May I welcome the Government’s proposals for a minimum price for alcohol? They are of course in keeping with the recommendations that the Home Affairs Committee made last year.”—[Official Report, 24 January 2011; Vol. 522, c. 3.]

In 2008, the Home Affairs Committee talked about the cheap availability of alcohol, recommending that

“the Government establish as soon as possible a legal basis for banning the use of loss-leading by supermarkets and setting a minimum price for the sale of alcohol.”

What I think I deciphered from the right hon. Lady’s bluster is that the Opposition actually support the idea of an alcohol strategy and what the Government are doing. If I am correct, I welcome that.

International Women’s Day

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Equalities (Lynne Featherstone)]

May I say first that the Home Secretary is very sorry not to be here to celebrate international women’s day? She is just back from Jordan and has to attend the JHA—justice and home affairs—meeting.

I thank my hon. Friends and hon. Members for all their contributions; I hope they will forgive me if I do not enumerate them one by one. International women’s day is a day for celebration, and I want to set out and celebrate what the Government are doing. We have heard many good contributions today and, sadly, some negative ones from Labour Members. Indeed, they have chosen to be very negative about the impacts of decisions that this Government have been forced to take to reduce the record deficit left to us by them. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd) pointed out, if we do not take action, it will be our daughters who have to pay for it.

Let me say that we are lifting 1.1 million of the lowest paid workers, more than half of whom are women, out of income tax altogether—and with more to come. We are increasing overall NHS spending by £11.5 billion in real terms. As part of that, we are recruiting over 4,000 new health visitors and doubling the number of places on the family nurse partnership programme by 2015. We are protecting key support for older women—with winter fuel payments, free eye tests, free prescriptions, free bus passes and free TV licences for the over-75s—and permanently increasing cold weather payments to £25.

Furthermore, we have re-linked earnings with pensions —something called for for years, which did not happen under the Labour Government. We are providing an extra £300 million for child care support under universal credit. Labour Members mentioned child care, yet against this terrible economic background we have maintained the entitlement to 15 hours a week of free education and care for three and four-year-olds. We are also extending the entitlement to 15 hours a week of free education and care for 260,000 of the most disadvantaged two-year-olds. We are funding online and telephone support services for families, and are providing over £28 million for specialist local, domestic and sexual violence support services. [Interruption.] As the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) said—[Hon. Members: “Give way.”] I will not give way; I have very little time. I am sorry, but everyone else has had their say and I am going to have mine.

We are spending £900,000 on helplines and providing £10.5 million over the next three years for rape support centres. Today, my right hon. and learned. Friend the Justice Secretary announced the locations of five new centres. As the shadow Minister mentioned, we are also creating two new specific criminal offences of stalking. We are tabling amendments to the Protection of Freedoms Bill for Lords Third Reading so that those new offences can be enacted as soon as possible.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady confirm that there will be two separate offences, and that the first offence will have a maximum sentence of only six months, and that in order for the second offence to carry a sentence of more than six months the police will be required to prove that someone is in fear of violence—which was objected to by the all-party parliamentary group, which said that that approach would not work?

[Lynne Featherstone]

This measure will be effective. It was welcomed by women and women’s groups across the board at No. 10 Downing street this morning. There will be two offences. One will carry a sentence of up to six months, and the other a maximum sentence of five years. This is good news—and it is a great shame that the Opposition do not have the grace to welcome it.

We are also working on gangs and girls, teenage abuse and forced marriage. We are putting women at the heart of the economy, too, through the Work programme, the new universal credit and the new national careers service, in order to give women the help and support they need.

The hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) is no longer in her place, but I take issue with her statement that there has been an increase in women’s unemployment. There are 50,000 more women in work now than a year ago.

In November, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced that the Government will provide resources for 5,000 volunteer mentors.

UK Border Agency

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I thank the Home Secretary for early sight of her statement, in which she makes important points about the fiascos at our border last summer, but it does not cover everything in the report from John Vine. In less than the hour that we have had to look at the report, we have found that it says something very different from the points that the Home Secretary has made.

For example, on the watch index checks from Calais, the Home Secretary’s statement today gives the House reason to believe that the problems had been going on since 2007. In fact, the watch index checks were suspended zero times in 2007, zero times in 2008, six times in 2009, 33 times in 2010 and 50 times in the first nine months of 2011. The report states:

“Although the figure for 2011 only covered nine months to the end of September, this represented a 51% increase over the previous year. The Agency should assess whether this increase can be attributed to changes in port infrastructure, increases in passenger numbers, a reduction in staff or a combination of all three.”

So the clear suggestion in the report is that a lack of staff may have increased the problems at the UK Border Agency in the past year, but the Home Secretary in her statement to Parliament has hidden that information.

On secure ID, the report states that it was suspended 482 times under this Government. The Immigration Minister approved the reduction in secure ID checks as part of the risk-based approach in January 2011, and again the Home Secretary has not explained how far Ministers’ authorisation, even if provisional, contributed to the downgrading of secure ID checks.

On the Immigration Minister’s further agreement to proposals, the report quotes the former head of the Border Force, who said:

“The Immigration Minister was clear that this did not require Home Secretary sign-off and he had followed up with a note stating that we should progress with the implementation.”

Time and again the Home Secretary has not set out the full information in the report.

On the level 2 pilots, the report is clear that they were downgraded over 2,000 times. That is not occasional, or under the “limited circumstances” that the Home Secretary told us about last year.

We have asked the Home Secretary before about the operational instruction that states:

“We will cease routinely opening the chip within EEA passports.”

She told the House on 9 November 2011 that that operational instruction did reflect Government policy, and that is the very guidance that led to checks being downgraded 2,000 times, for hours at a time, covering huge numbers of people.

On page 12, the report states:

“We found that the language used in both the ‘Summer pressures’ submission to Ministers and the response provided, was not clear and as a result was open to misinterpretation… For example, the written response from the Home Secretary’s office said that ‘the change in checks should not be a routine measure but only used when the queues get beyond a reasonable length.’ As the key terms were not clearly defined, we found this had been interpreted and operated in different ways at different ports.”

The report is clear:

“Given the importance of decisions to suspend border security checks, it is imperative that the language used is absolutely clear and unambiguous.”

Clearly, the language from the Home Secretary’s private office was not clear and unambiguous, and that led to huge confusion in the Border Force across the country.

There is no evidence in the report of proper monitoring by Ministers. It is scathing about the way in which checks were downgraded and talks about unauthorised activity. Why on earth were Ministers not asking for information and not properly monitoring the pilot that they had authorised and introduced? One of the updates, which it appears did not go to Ministers, makes it clear that secure ID was suspended as part of the checks over the summer. Why did that update not go to Ministers and why did they not ask for that information? Why did they accept only three updates over the course of the summer, when seven were provided? Why were Ministers not visiting the ports to ensure that the pilot that they had introduced was being properly implemented? Ministers decided to roll back the principle that had been in operation for many years—that we should gradually strengthen and tighten our border checks, using new technology and biometrics—and to introduce a huge experiment with border security. They made no proper checks to see what was happening during the fiasco last summer.

Finally, when confronted last November with the problems that had arisen, the Home Secretary told us that

“initial UKBA statistics show an almost 10% increase in the detection of illegal immigrants and a 48% increase in the identification of forged documents compared with the year before.”—[Official Report, 9 November 2011; Vol. 535, c. 318.]

She said that that had happened as a result of her pilots. However, the facts in the report show something very different. The Heathrow data alone show that the number of people refused entry was more than 100 lower each month—not higher—compared with 2010. The official statistics show a 10% drop in the number of non-asylum seekers who were stopped at ports compared with the previous year. Will the Home Secretary take this opportunity to apologise to the House for giving it premature and inaccurate information about the supposed success of her pilots, when clearly they were a huge failure in controlling the border?

The Home Secretary told us that her pilots did not weaken border security. The report states that

“it is not possible to quantify the extent of the risk that these measures presented to the border.”

The implications of that for our border are very serious, yet the Home Secretary continues to hide. She has hidden behind a report and not set out its full consequences, just as she has blamed officials, hidden from the media and hidden behind spurious statistics. In opposition, she said of a former Immigration Minister:

“I’m sick and tired of…government ministers…who simply blame other people when things go wrong.”

That is what she is doing now. It is time for her to stop hiding and to take responsibility for things that have happened on her watch: the unclear instructions from her office, the policy decisions to downgrade our border controls, the failure to monitor and check what was going on, and her failure to take responsibility. This mess escalated on her watch with every month that went by. Unless she accepts responsibility for this fiasco, she will fail to sort it out and she will fail to reassure the House that she can cope with future fiascos and that she is the Home Secretary to keep our borders secure.

[Mrs May]

The shadow Home Secretary’s mock outrage would have rather greater credibility if she had shown any real interest in immigration or border control at any stage over the year for which she has been doing her job. I remind her that the Vine report states that security checks have been suspended without ministerial authorisation since at least 2007. The suspension of checks of which I told the House in November happened without ministerial authorisation, and that unauthorised suspension had nothing to do with the pilot that I authorised last summer.

The right hon. Lady makes a number of claims in relation to the report. I suggest that she consider her track record on such claims. The Vine report exposes everything that she claimed last November as plain wrong. She said that the pilot was reckless, but the Vine report shows that Labour Ministers approved similar measures. She said that the pilot gave the Border Force the green light to suspend other checks, but the report shows that the suspensions were unauthorised.

The right hon. Lady said that by sometimes suspending warnings index checks on certain children, we risked an increase in trafficking. Not only is that wrong, but the Vine report makes it clear that Labour Ministers approved the suspension of checks on children. She said that we should have known about the unauthorised suspension of checks, but the Vine report makes it clear that information was withheld from Ministers and that unauthorised suspensions have been going on since at least 2007. She repeated that Labour increased checks on passengers and improved security, but the Vine report shows that it did not.

The right hon. Lady mentioned information about what happened during the pilot. I did indeed report figures to the House in November. They were the ones that were available at the time, and I faithfully reported them to the House. Since then, the chief inspector has discovered that unauthorised suspensions were made, so it is not possible to give a full picture of what effect the pilot had. We remain open-minded about risk-based checks, but they must be implemented in a controlled and authorised way.

The right hon. Lady blamed what has happened on cuts. I know that is her Pavlovian response to everything, but I would have thought she had noted that on the second page of the Vine report the chief inspector states that the suspensions were

“affected by a number of factors including…the numbers of staff deployed”—

the numbers deployed, not the numbers employed. As with the police, the right hon. Lady seems to find it very difficult to get her head around that. Just in case she has forgotten, I remind her that the previous Government planned to cut UKBA budgets.

The right hon. Lady talked about information that was available to Ministers about the pilot. I remind her that the Vine report makes it clear that updates to Ministers on the pilot

“were not balanced…presented an inaccurate picture of performance”

and

“could not be relied upon to determine the success or otherwise of Level 2.”

There is nothing more important than the security of our border, so it is a shame that the right hon. Lady has taken the approach that she has and has not addressed the measures that we are undertaking to secure our border and ensure that the Border Force is the law enforcement agency it should be. We did not hear any of her views on the recommendations in the Vine report, the proposal to take the Border Force out of the UKBA or the proposal to change the approach that the Border Force takes, because she has nothing positive to say about immigration or border security.

Abu Qatada

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I have been used, over time in my political life, to words that I have said being taken slightly out of context. I said that it was my personal view that the Human Rights Act should be repealed, not that I was about to repeal it—which my hon. Friend sort of implied in his question. I would simply remind him that even if we were to repeal the Human Rights Act, we would of course still be subject to the European convention and the European Court.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary has given a serious account of the risk from Abu Qatada. She will know that we agree that he should be deported, on the grounds of being a risk to national security. However, she has not said much about what she is doing now in response to the judgment. She is right to look at the legal options for appealing against the European Court judgment, but what more is she doing to get further assurances from Jordan so that he can be deported now? She will know that an agreement was reached by the British Government before the election, so it is possible to make diplomatic progress. We understand that the British ambassador has been in some discussions, but what actions have Ministers taken? Has the Home Secretary taken this up herself with the Jordanian Government? If she has not done so, will she do so now? If so, will she go back to SIAC to ask for a stay of the bail until those high-level discussions with the Jordanian Government have been completed, given the urgency and seriousness of this case?

On the second issue—protecting public safety in the meantime—it is unclear whether the Home Secretary is looking for more evidence to take to SIAC to overturn the bail decision. However, what will happen if the negotiations with Jordan fail and if the courts conclude that bail cannot be extended in three months’ time? Those are the circumstances that control orders were introduced to address, but her decision has been to weaken those counter-terror laws, and that will make it harder. Under the current system, if TPIMs have to be introduced after three months if bail is stopped, she will not be able to ask the courts for a curfew—only an overnight residence requirement—and she will have to provide access to the internet and telephones. She will not be able to ask the courts to relocate Abu Qatada outside London, should that be appropriate—during the Olympics, for example—nor will she be able to extend those restrictions for more than two years. The restrictions that the Home Secretary will have available to her in three months’ time are a far cry from the restrictions that she and the courts understandably believe are necessary now to protect the public, which include the 22-hour curfew, no access to the internet and no access to phones.

The Home Secretary cannot blame the European Court for her decision to weaken British counter-terror powers. The courts, the security experts and the Home Secretary have all made it clear that Abu Qatada is a continued threat to public safety and national security. We support her in her actions to protect the public and get the deportation in place, but she should be straining every sinew, on behalf of the public, to get him deported. If she cannot, she should make sure that we have the legislation and the safeguards in place to protect the public now.

[Mrs May]

I have to say to the shadow Home Secretary that she appears to have prepared her statement before listening to my answer, because I made it clear that I continue to believe that Qatada should face trial in Jordan and that the Government have begun discussions with the Jordanians to see what assurances we can secure about the quality of evidence used in their courts. We will be pursuing those discussions at every level that is appropriate to ensure that we work towards the aim that we share across the House: getting the assurances that will enable us to deport Abu Qatada. As I said, we will also consider the legal options that are available, including whether we should refer the case to the Grand Chamber, but we need to consider the consequences of those actions before we take a decision.

I referred, obviously, to the bail conditions that have been placed on Qatada, as the right hon. Lady did. I continue to believe that he should be behind bars. The bail conditions are among the most stringent on anybody facing deportation from Britain. She referred to the difference between TPIMs and control orders. I remind her that the bail conditions are stronger than would be possible under TPIMs or control orders. I also refer her to the wider point that I have made about TPIMs in the Chamber in the past, which is that the police and the Security Service are content with the package that was negotiated in relation to TPIMs and with the extra funding that has been made available to the Security Service and the police.

We should be able to deport Abu Qatada; that is the view across the whole House. He should be behind bars. Home Office Ministers and previous Home Secretaries under the previous Government have tried to do everything possible to get him to Jordan, and that is what this Government are trying to do. The case has been ongoing since 2001. In 2008, there was a brief period during which he was released on bail. We should send a clear message from across the House that we believe he should be deported, and this Government are doing what we can to ensure that we achieve that. That is what is right for the security of our citizens.

Oral Answers to Questions

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)]

I am happy to tell my hon. Friend that £350 million a year will be saved through the freeze on police pay. I am also happy to confirm that the shadow Home Secretary endorsed that policy 10 days ago. The Opposition are therefore effectively committed to the same savings programme as the Government.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

May I join the Home Secretary not only in congratulating, but in paying our tributes and respects to, Her Majesty the Queen on the 60th anniversary of her accession? The Home Secretary has talked a lot today about the deployment of police and about increasing the number of police officers on the front line. Will she tell the House what has happened to the number of police officers in front-line jobs since the general election?

[Mrs May]

The shadow Home Secretary will know full well that Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary is making it clear that the proportion of officers on the front line has increased and will continue to increase. The question that she has to ask herself, given that she and her colleagues are now supporting the spending cuts that the Government have been putting through, is why they will not be clear to police officers and members of the public about the impact it will have.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has ducked the question. I do not know whether she knows the answer. She will know that we are clear that there should be a 12% reduction in the policing budget, which would protect the number of police officers, not her 20% cut, which will mean 16,000 police officers being lost.

The Home Secretary needs to answer the question about the front line. I asked her about the number, not the proportion. The same HMIC report that she has been given includes data showing that the number of police officers in front-line jobs was cut by 4,000 in one year alone, following the general election. So will she now admit that her claims that she is protecting the front line are rubbish, and will she give the public a straight answer about protecting the police?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Lady said that the Opposition supported a 12% cut in police budgets. They also support the pay freeze and the savings available through the outcome of the police arbitration tribunal. They said that we should accept the recommendations on those matters. The shadow policing Minister has also indicated that a significant sum of money should be taken out of overtime and shift patterns. That all adds up to a commitment by Her Majesty’s Opposition to a 20% cut in police funding—the same position as the Government. Now let us get on with talking about things like deployment rather than about the right hon. Lady’s failure to be clear with people about her position on supporting police cuts.

Oral Answers to Questions

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I feel the need not to let it rest there, Mr Speaker, but to respond to the question that my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) asked. I am sure that he will agree that what matters is accessibility to police. That is why one thing the Government are doing is reducing the amount of bureaucracy that the police have to deal with so that they can get out on the streets more. It is also why a number of forces up and down the country are considering accessibility in a different way, rather than simply having fixed police stations. I understand that Essex, for example, has seven mobile police stations that go to areas where people congregate, such as supermarket car parks, to increase accessibility to the police for members of the public.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

At the end of this month, the control orders legislation expires and the police and security services will have just six weeks’ transition to get the new weaker terrorism prevention and investigation measures and extra surveillance in place. The assistant commissioner of the Met, in a recent letter placed in the Library of the House, confirms the Met’s position last summer that

“it would take at least a year to recruit and train additional surveillance teams”.

She also says that

“not all the additional assets will be immediately in place”.

Why, then, is the Home Secretary so determined to push ahead with weaker counter-terror powers so quickly? Why does she not delay them and avoid piling extra pressure and risk on to the Met in the new year?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Lady knows full well that the Metropolitan Police Service and the Security Service will not have just six weeks to put transitional arrangements in place. They have been aware for some time that TPIMs would come in and extra funding would be available for extra surveillance. Subsequent to the letter sent by the assistant commissioner, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has written to the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee to make it absolutely clear that effective transitional arrangements from control orders to TPIMs will be in place to ensure that we continue to do what we want to do and what everybody wants us to do: that is, maintain the security of people in this country.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Met has been put in a very difficult position. This is Olympic year and it will have considerable additional pressures from policing the games, from counter-terrorism and from an £80 million budget gap. There are no guarantees that it will not have to stump up for some of the riot compensation, too. The letter from the Met says that

“it is not possible to assess fully how the measures will work with the additional capability until both are fully in place and bedded in.”

The Home Secretary is forcing the police to conduct an experiment with security in Olympic year. The letter says:

“We will…seek to ensure that there is no substantial increase in overall risk to the UK.”

Why does this Home Secretary want to be personally responsible for any increase in the overall risk to the UK in Olympic year as a result of the timing of her legislation? Why does she not think again?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Lady knows that when we introduced TPIMs we were able to give assurances about the mitigation of risks in relation to TPIMs and their replacement of control orders. I ask her to reflect on why the coalition Government reviewed counter-terrorism legislation when we came to power. It was because of a concern about the impact of some of the legislation that her Government had introduced. It was a rebalancing of the necessary role of ensuring national security and maintaining civil liberties that led us to review that legislation. We have in place measures that I believe will enable us to provide the security that we need to provide. The package of measures includes TPIMs and extra money for surveillance for both the Security Service and the police, and I am confident that that package will give them the degree of cover they need to ensure that we maintain security.

Intelligence and Security Committee

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I, too, welcome the Intelligence and Security Committee’s annual report and the work that the Committee has done this year, which was comprehensively set out by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind).

It is 13 years since I last spoke in a debate on a report by the Intelligence and Security Committee. That was before the attacks of 9/11, before the London bombings of 7/7 and the damage done by al-Qaeda, before the most recent military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq and at a very different stage in the Northern Ireland peace process. There have been dramatic changes since then in the nature of the threats that Britain faces and in the nature of the work of the intelligence and security agencies to keep us safe. However, many of the principles that we debated then, such as the importance of accountability and managing the tensions between liberty and security and between democracy and secrecy, remain as valid and as pertinent now.

I join the Committee and the Home Secretary in paying tribute to those who work in the intelligence and security agencies, and I place on the record the gratitude of the Opposition and those we represent. Our intelligence officers and agents are not known. By its very nature, their work must go unsung. Some have even died in the course of their work and have been laid to rest quietly with no public tribute. They work tirelessly, sometimes in dangerous conditions, to find a piece of a jigsaw that will never be fully complete, but which could yet save lives.

In this debate, we must pay tribute from the Front Benches to the work of the ISC, as the Home Secretary has done. Its members take extremely seriously their responsibility to provide accountability, even though they cannot discuss or debate in public many of the issues that they pursue privately. There is a long tradition of cross-party working and consensus in the Committee, as indeed there should be, on many issues to do with intelligence and our national interest. I congratulate the Committee on its latest report. I also thank those who represent the Opposition on the Committee, my right hon. Friends the Members for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) and for Knowsley (Mr Howarth), for their hard work on behalf of this side of the House and Parliament as a whole.

As the Committee and Ministers have made clear, the security risks that we face have become more diverse and technologically advanced than at any time in our history. Hostile attacks in cyberspace by other states and terrorist groups have the potential to cause serious damage to the security and prosperity of the UK. The Home Secretary has set out the continued threat from al-Qaeda and rightly paid tribute to the work of our armed forces. The work on international terrorism and counter-proliferation are becoming more closely connected. We are also dealing with new challenges, such as helping new states to emerge from the Arab spring. The older and more established threat from groups in Northern Ireland is now a growing concern.

Our security and intelligence agencies have expanded their work substantially over the past decade, supported by increased resources that were rightly provided over many years to keep Britain safe. The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington was right to point to the increasingly mature debate on security and accountability. As a result, there are large areas of agreement across the Committee and across the House on security and our national interest.

The Committee has rightly welcomed the work done by the Government through the National Security Council and the growing focus on cyber-terrorism. It is right that the Government and the agencies are increasing investment and action in that area. I also welcome the ISC’s continued scrutiny of the Prevent and Contest strategies, which we have discussed on the Floor of the House.

Like the Committee Chair, I welcome the Government’s attempts in the justice and security Green Paper to address the difficult issues of the control principle and the use of sensitive material in civil cases. Those are not easy problems to solve, but they are extremely important given the chilling effect on international intelligence arrangements if sensitive material is at risk of being disclosed. I noted the important points that the right hon. Gentleman made about the detail, practicality and workability of measures, and we stand ready to work with the Government to get that right, because it is hugely important.

We welcome, too, the Gibson inquiry, which is important for maintaining confidence in the work of the intelligence agencies. The Committee may wish to look further at that matter in advance of the Gibson inquiry beginning its work, while there remain legal delays, to ensure that the inquiry can achieve its aims.

A number of concerns are raised as a result of the Committee’s report. In particular, in the face of the ever-changing threats, the Committee’s scrutiny of resources is extremely important. The report rightly identifies areas in which the agencies could make greater savings by, for example, exploring a consolidated approach to vetting. The Home Secretary should also take seriously the Committee’s concerns about the scale of the real-terms cuts that the agencies are facing, particularly in Olympic year. The increases in inflation since the spending review have increased those real-terms cuts. Ministers will be aware that the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service told the Committee:

“It’s quite hard to…maintain the capability of the Service when we face a 10% reduction in staff”.

Clearly all Departments and agencies need to make their share of efficiencies, but in the current circumstances it is vital that the Government accept the Committee’s recommendation that

“Given the importance of national security work, it is essential that the Spending Review settlement can be adjusted if there is a significant change in the threat.”

We are also concerned about the particular pressures surrounding the Olympics. According to figures from the Library, the real reduction in the single intelligence account next year alone will be £60 million. Next year is the year in which the eyes of the world will be on us for the Olympics, and the Home Secretary rightly discussed the Olympics in her speech. The evidence quoted in the Committee’s report shows the pressure that the agencies will face. The Security Service chief has said that

“there will be a large diversion of resource from other things into the Olympics. But I don’t think we’ve got any option about that.”

The Secret Intelligence Service chief has said that the Olympics

“will certainly have an impact on our intelligence operations and intelligence coverage of other targets during that period.”

The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary must take seriously the Committee’s warning that it is

“nevertheless concerned that this will inevitably divert resources from the Service’s other work during this period, and thus expose the UK to greater risk.”

At a time when thousands of police officers are being lost, the Home Secretary and the Treasury should take the opportunity to review the level of resources available for security and policing next year to ensure that they are sufficient for the threats that we will face.

As a result of the Olympics, there is also an additional reason for the Home Secretary to re-examine counter-terror powers, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles has raised. The Home Secretary is aware of our deep concern that she is removing the ability to keep terror suspects out of London in Olympic year through control orders. The director-general of the Security Service told the Committee that under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill and with additional resources,

“there should be no substantial increase in overall risk.”

Frankly, however, it is very hard for the House to understand why the Home Secretary should want any increase in overall risk, let alone one that is entirely a result of her own policies. The Committee is right to warn the Government about that and to raise the concern that the new regime does not offer the same level of assurance as control orders.

We know that the Government have themselves admitted that there are issues to consider in that regard. Indeed, the Home Office has recently written to the House of Lords to say that the transitional period between control orders and TPIMs will be extended from 28 days to 42 days in an amendment to be tabled in the Lords in response, I understand, to resourcing concerns raised by the Metropolitan police. However, would it not be wise to delay the implementation of TPIMs altogether, at least until after the Olympics have taken place? Frankly, it is simply not responsible for the Government to reduce counter-terror powers, as well as resources, at a time when we know the pressures are growing. I urge the Home Secretary to examine the Committee’s report carefully and think again.

Turning to the ISC’s proposals for its own reform, the current Chair called for those reforms even before he was appointed, and I welcome his continued commitment to them. The Committee has certainly evolved since the 1994 Act, as he rightly pointed out. It started with no investigatory resource, which changed after the debates in the late ’90s. Over the years, increasing levels of detail have been provided to the Committee, and also by the Committee to the public, including more information about overall budgets and information from other Departments and organisations. Although many people in the agencies viewed the Committee with a certain suspicion and anxiety in its early years, I believe most now agree about its importance and the benefits that the agencies are provided with by having accountability and independent scrutiny. The Committee can bust myths and counteract attacks on the agencies as well as challenge and explore problems without putting security at risk in any way.

However, it is time to go further, and both the ISC and the Government are right to want reform now. The Government are right to consider strengthened executive accountability and greater scrutiny of the agencies through the executive and judicial routes, and they are right to consider options such as an inspector-general, although I understand that considerably more work will need to be done on that approach. For many years, the tradition of the agencies was one of very little executive oversight. Ministers would decide the overall framework, but they did not have clear accountability for how operations took place. That executive accountability has increased over the years, with the roles of the different commissioners being strengthened, but I do not believe it is yet on a sensible long-term footing, and the Government are right to explore that further.

It is also right that we look further at parliamentary oversight. I believe that we should have gone further on that under the previous Government. It is right to consider creating a statutory Committee of Parliament with much stronger access to information. Of course, the Committee will always have to operate in a different way from other parliamentary Committees. The principle of its operating inside the so-called ring of secrecy is integral to much of its work, so it requires additional safeguards, including on how Committee members are selected. However, I believe that the Government could still go further.

The Home Secretary said that the Government were still cautiously considering the proposal that the Committee’s work should cover operations. Of course, it is not for the Committee to second-guess operations in advance, which is not what the ISC is proposing, but there needs to be parliamentary scrutiny of not only the policies and good intentions of the agencies, but operations. Ministers and the agencies actively resisted that when the Committee was first established in 1994, but in fact the Committee has already gone further in practice than was originally intended in legislation. It is important to support it now and give it the proper underpinnings that it needs to be able to examine operations properly and thoroughly where it is appropriate to do so, and where the Committee believes that a significant issue needs to be investigated. I urge the Home Secretary to make progress in that area and accept the principle of the Committee’s recommendations.

I also believe that there is a strong case for the Committee, or at least its Chair, to see more detail on individual cases. I have seen no convincing reason to deny the Committee, or its Chair, access to the full oversight reports on the agencies by the various commissioners, including the annexes, which are currently often withheld.

It would help the House, too, for the ISC—or, again, at least for its Chair—to have access to the detailed papers on individual control order cases as, for example, the commissioner currently does. Again, that would not be to second-guess current cases, but so that the House could reflect on the implications of those cases for legislation. For example, we may be asked to introduce emergency legislation on TPIMs or on extending pre-charge detention, yet it is a genuine problem for Parliament that the only person who has seen all the cases that justify changing legislation is the Home Secretary who proposes the new legislation. There are too few checks and balances in that system, which is bad for democracy but ultimately also bad for the Home Secretary and for confidence in national security. It would be far better for Parliament and for the Home Secretary to have another independent voice that can come to judgment on the basis of the evidence and advise Parliament. Stronger counter-terror powers can be justified, but I would like stronger checks and balances alongside them. The Opposition would prefer to retain control orders, especially in Olympics year, but we would also prefer greater scrutiny of the control order regime by Parliament, including the ISC.

Finally, I am astonished to find myself in agreement with the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash), who in last year’s debate argued that the ISC Chair should be an Opposition Member. There are significant advantages to the ISC following the example of the Public Accounts Committee, the Chair of which is a senior Member of the Opposition. That is not to cast aspersions on the current ISC Chair, who would make an admirable Chair any time in opposition, nor is it—perhaps more importantly —to cast aspersions on my right hon. Friends who did admirable jobs as ISC Chairs when Labour was in government. They would make excellent ISC Chairs now, but perceived independence and credibility is even more important for the ISC than for other Committees.

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Lady for the additional comments that she has volunteered. The House might like to be reminded that there is nothing to stop an Opposition Member from being ISC Chair. In fact, there is a precedent. Tom King, now Lord King of Bridgwater, was the first ISC Chair and remained for a period after the Labour Government came into power in 1997. It is entirely available to Opposition Members, depending on who they are.

[Yvette Cooper]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right that there are precedents. In fact, Lord King was Chair when I was a member of the ISC between 1997 and 1999, and he continued through to 2001. The principle of the Public Accounts Committee is that as a matter of course the Chair is a Member of the Opposition. The value of that is this: exactly because the ISC must operate behind closed doors, it needs to be seen to be independent and authoritative in its conclusions; and exactly because it cannot tell us the evidence on which its judgments are based, it needs to be perceived by the wider public to be independent of Ministers. That is important for the agencies as well as for the public.

In the 1998 debate, the then ISC Chair, Tom King, spoke of the importance of the Committee having a unanimous all-party voice and authority:

“When a situation arises that gives serious cause for public concern…We shall not be able to help matters unless we can say that we have investigated the allegations, with…access to all the relevant information”.—[Official Report, 2 November 1998; Vol. 318, c. 594.]

Those words stand today. When I spoke in that debate, I said that accountability through the ISC lay at the heart of the tension not just between liberty and security, but between democracy and secrecy:

“We have certainly come a long way since the mere existence of MI5 and MI6 was denied. I believe that, sooner or later, we will travel much further. We will have to improve our system of accountability, for the sake not only of democracy but of the very secret agencies that the United Kingdom needs to function and to protect our modern democracy. If we do not improve our system of accountability, those agencies’ capacity to operate in the national interest will be threatened.”—[Official Report, 2 November 1998; Vol. 318, c. 613.]

Those words, too, still stand.

The role of the ISC has become stronger since 1998 and it does vital work. Accountability has increased, but it has not yet gone far enough. The Government’s reforms are welcome, but they should be brave and go further, so that we continue to have effective agencies that have the confidence of the public in a modern democracy. Sooner or later, we will have that.

Border Control Scheme

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask for an urgent statement on border control this summer, covering private flights.

[The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)]

Let me apologise for the fact that the Home Secretary cannot be here; she is attending an important meeting of the National Security Council.

It is simply not true that immigration and customs checks for all private flights were abandoned under this Government. In fact, the controls against high-risk private flights were strengthened, and that is entirely consistent with our overall approach to border security of using more intelligence-led checks against high-risk passengers and journeys. Far from weakening our border controls, those measures were aimed at strengthening our border.

Under the previous Government, it was clear that the UK Border Agency’s procedures for private flights meant that some high-risk flights were missed, and this left our country open to the risk of drug smuggling, illegal immigration and gun running. In fact, the previous Government did not even have agreed definitions of high-risk, medium-risk or low-risk private flights, and there were no standard operational procedures: flights landing in one part of the country might be met by a UKBA team; the exact same flight landing somewhere else might not.

Indeed, under the previous Government, Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation, called private aviation the UK’s “soft underbelly”. To get a grip on that chaotic situation, in January the UKBA developed a new strategy for private flights, with the aim of meeting 100% of all high-risk flights through the use of better intelligence and increased compliance, the greater use of the warnings index and a standardised risk-assessment procedure. It gave us for the first time a consistent national system for dealing with private aviation, and it drew on the resources of the police and other agencies to make sure that all high-risk flights were met.

The strategy makes use of the legal requirement for pilots to submit records of their passengers. Those are checked against the warnings index, and a full, standardised risk assessment is carried out. The UKBA will deploy officers to meet any flight on which police or other intelligence causes concern, or on which there is a warnings index hit. Local UKBA teams, field intelligence officers and the police then work to ensure a high level of compliance with these procedures, which are, for the first time, consistent across the country. In the view of UKBA senior management, the new strategy is finally getting on top of the risk from private aviation.

Everything that Ministers in this Government have authorised has been done to strengthen our borders: resources focused on high-risk passengers and journeys, a new strategy to sort out private aviation, a new National Crime Agency with a border policing command, e-Borders to check passengers in and out of the country, and tough enforcement. Some 400,000 visas were rejected last year and 68,000 people with the wrong documents were prevented from coming to Britain in the first place.

These particular operational changes were made to address a problem that had existed for years and had been identified but not acted on by the Government of whom the shadow Home Secretary was a member. The border is safer now than it was two years ago. I commend this statement to the House.

[Yvette Cooper]

Last week, the Home Secretary told the House:

“the only incident of which I am aware when passengers were waved through passport control without any checks at all did not occur during my pilot. It happened in 2004”.—[Official Report, 9 November 2011; Vol. 535, c. 324.]

Yesterday, I was shown e-mails from the border agency from June 2011, which show that immigrations and customs checks were stopped on arrivals of private flights, in accordance with a new national general aviation strategy. That and the answer the Minister for Immigration has just given contradict the information given by the Home Secretary last week.

Why, then, does the Home Secretary not feel that she should come to this House to answer the growing number of questions about this borders fiasco? She has refused to come to the House and she has refused to do interviews for nearly two weeks. One e-mail from 14 June refers to the instruction not to see passengers arriving on private charter flights for either immigrations or customs purposes and states:

“we are not allowed to physically see the passengers”.

Does the Minister for Immigration agree that the Home Secretary was wrong to say that no passengers had been, as she put it, “waved through” on arrival? Will he now correct that?

According to Treasury figures, there are 80,000 to 90,000 private flights a year. Will the Minister tell the House how many of those flights went through with no checks on arrival and what the security and immigration implications are of not even checking whether the number of people getting off the plane is the same as had been advised? If there was a new general aviation strategy, why did the Home Secretary not refer to it last week? Did she even know it existed? Was it in the weekly updates we now know went to the Minister for Immigration? How does that strategy relate to the so-called pilot?

There are far more questions than answers in this continuing borders fiasco. How on earth can we have any confidence in what the Home Secretary says is happening at our borders? She will not come and answer the questions. She said that no one was waved through, but it is clear that many passengers were. She said that Brodie Clark went further than she authorised and admitted he had done so, but this morning Brodie Clark has said categorically that he did not. She said that the performance of the border agency improved this summer, but this morning the head of the statistics agency described that as a highly selective use of statistics that may, indeed, be in breach of the ministerial code. Did the Home Secretary knowingly provide wrong information or did she just not have a clue what was going on at Britain’s borders? She cannot keep running away. She must come to this House herself and answer these vital questions about what was happening at the border agency this summer.

[Damian Green]

It is a shame that the shadow Home Secretary wrote that rant before she listened to what I said in response to her first question. To say that the Home Secretary has not been visible in this House is palpably absurd. She was here twice last week—[Hon. Members: “ Where is she?”] She is attending a meeting of the National Security Council. I am sorry that the shadow Home Secretary does not seem to think that that is an important part of the Home Secretary’s responsibilities. I am sure that the House thinks it is an important part of the Home Secretary’s responsibilities. The right hon. Lady’s basic accusation that the Home Secretary has in any way not answered these questions is, as I say, palpably absurd.

The second question the right hon. Lady asked—indeed, the only substantive one in her rather scatter-gun approach —was about how many people were coming through without being checked. The answer, now, is that every private flight is checked against the warnings index. [Interruption.] I commend Opposition Front Benchers for saying that it is a bit late now. Yes, it is—for 13 years, nothing happened; the right hon. Lady has put her finger on it. There was a shambles in the immigration system, and private aviation was part of it. That was identified by the Government’s own counter-terrorism adviser, but they did nothing about it. We now have done something about it, and that means that every flight is checked against the warnings index and every high-risk flight is met. If there have been changes, as there have been this year, they have been for the better and they have made our borders safer.

Border Checks Summer 2011

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes with concern the significant reduction in the level of security and border checks at UK ports of entry in the summer of 2011; and calls on the Government to publish immediately all relevant Home Office submissions to Ministers, together with the instructions from Home Office Ministers to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) regarding passport checks in the summer of 2011 and the relevant operational instructions from UKBA executives to staff and all data collected by the UKBA on the level of checks at each port of entry since July 2011.

We have called this Opposition day debate to discuss the events in border control this summer, because Parliament and the public need answers. I am sorry that more Cabinet Ministers have not joined us for the debate, because this borders fiasco is now escalating. The Home Secretary did not answer all the questions put to her on Monday, she could not answer all those from the Home Affairs Select Committee today, and she and her Immigration Minister are refusing to do television, radio or newspaper interviews on the subject. However, she cannot hide on the important issue of border control. Answers are needed, and her account of what led to the weakening of border controls this summer is now at odds not just with the memos from the UK Border Agency, but with the account of one of her most senior officials, Brodie Clark.

The public need the truth, so let us be clear about the information that the Home Secretary needs to provide. Most importantly, we still need to know the scale of the security breaches that have taken place. Does the Home Secretary yet have any estimate of how many people were affected by the weakening of border controls? The Prime Minister could not tell us today.

On Monday the Home Secretary told us that she was concerned about the routine removal of checks for EU citizens, the suspension of the watch list in Calais and the suspension of fingerprinting non-EU citizens on top of the removal of watch list checks for children, which she authorised. Border agencies have told us of repeated cases in which adults did not have their passports swiped at all, along with no checks against the watch list, not just at Calais but at other ports. The Home Secretary needs to tell us whether that happened.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

Before I give way to Back Benchers, I should like to offer the Home Secretary the opportunity to intervene and tell us whether watch lists were relaxed—[Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The debate is going to continue, so everybody can listen to the debate, and if the right hon. Lady wishes to give way she will do so. We do not need people to keep coming up, one after another.

[Yvette Cooper]

I should like to give the Home Secretary the opportunity to clarify quickly whether the watch list was relaxed at any ports of entry other than Calais.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has not intervened, so let me give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Alok Sharma]

Listening to the tone of the right hon. Lady’s opening comments, one would almost think that her party had left immigration in absolutely perfect order. Let me remind her that it left a system which her own Home Secretary at the time said was “not fit for purpose”, with a backlog of 450,000 asylum cases, and that Lord Glasman, her own colleague, said:

“Labour lied…about…immigration and the extent of illegal”—[Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. The House will come to order on both sides, and if we are going to have interventions they must be much shorter and we must not make speeches. That will come later.

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharman) has obviously got himself into a Whips-induced lather, but if he is concerned about asylum cases he may want to ask the Home Secretary about the 100,000 cases that have now been written off, as identified in the Home Affairs Committee report.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I am a representative of Dover. This issue is a key concern to my constituents, as is Brodie Clark’s statement that such controls had been relaxed since about 2008-09. Who authorised that relaxation?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman, as a representative of Dover, will I know be concerned by the removal of the watch list checks in Calais. Like him, I certainly look forward to Brodie Clark’s evidence to the Home Affairs Committee next week. I am not sure whether the Home Secretary will be looking forward to his evidence in quite the same way, but I am sure that he will set out at that point—

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. In view of the fact that the Government deliberately took an hour away from this time-limited debate with a statement that could easily have been made yesterday, will you make it difficult for hon. Members reading out Whips’ questions to intervene on my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Sir Gerald knows as well as I do that that is not a point of order. He has certainly made the point that people were upset by the statement, but it is for the Government to decide the business of the House, and they control the business of the House. I have certainly already recommended shorter interventions, however, and I am sure that that will have been taken on board.

[Yvette Cooper]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

The Home Secretary has still not told us the extent of the reduction in border checks throughout the country. She said on Monday that she had no clue how many people walked into the country under reduced checks. On Monday, she did not even know which airports were covered by her pilot projects and her decisions. Yesterday she told the Select Committee that she knew which airports were covered in theory, but she had no idea which ones had taken up her pilot project.

Data exist, however. According to the internal e-mails that I have seen, downgrading checks to level 2 is recorded by terminals. Indeed, one would expect it to be. How could the so-called pilots be monitored if the data were not being collected on what was happening? So, does the Home Secretary have those data? Can she tell us now how many times checks were downgraded at how many airports since her decision in July? Has she even asked to see those data, and if she has not, why on earth not? What have this Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister been up to?

If the Home Secretary does have access to the data and has seen the figures on the number of times that checks were downgraded to level 2, will she step up to the Dispatch Box now and tell us what the data say? The public have a right to know what the downgrade in security was this summer. Again, we hear a deafening silence from the Home Secretary. Again, we do not know what data were collected.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that he shares my concern that we still do not have any clear data on the way in which border security checks were downgraded this summer.

[Robert Halfon]

I have just a simple question for the right hon. Lady. How many people entered the UK without being checked against the warnings index between 2008 and 2010?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman’s constituents will want to know what is happening now, and what happened this summer. His Government and his Home Secretary cannot answer the questions. They cannot even tell us more about the pilots, or the decisions they thought they were taking—what they thought they were signing up to.

We know that the Home Secretary thought that in theory her pilot covered European citizens, but in practice it routinely did so. That is a funny definition of a pilot. It was not just one Thursday afternoon a month in Luton; it was every airport and potentially every European citizen. Millions of them entered Britain this summer, and they formed the majority of foreign citizens entering the country, so how many of them missed the full checks? How many of them did the Home Secretary expect to face reduced checks when she gave the go-ahead for this so-called pilot earlier this year?

We know, too, from the UK Border Agency’s internal minutes this summer that there was a reference to

“mixed views on the summer pressures work, including the concern that not checking children on the watch list may facilitate child trafficking”.

Officials raised that concern within the UKBA, and I raised it with the Home Secretary on Monday. She will know that the House has repeatedly expressed deep concern about people trafficking across Europe, so did she even consider those risks before she took her decision?

The intention of Labour Ministers and, I had always understood, Conservative Ministers, too, was to strengthen our border checks year on year. We all agree that there were difficulties in the past, but I thought that we all agreed, too, on the remedy—that we should roll out e-Borders, biometrics and new technology; make sure that enough staff were in place so that we could increase checks and cover everybody properly by counting people in and out; and every year extend the technology and strengthen the checks.

This Home Secretary and this Home Office made a conscious decision to turn the clock back and to reduce the checks. What they put in place this summer was a new regime of lower not higher checks, using less rather than more technology.

[Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman if he can tell me whether he believes we should strengthen and extend biometric tests, rather than reduce them.

[Sajid Javid]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. In 2008, the then Government reduced warnings index checks on European economic area nationals, children and adults, on Eurostar services, and they did so on 100 separate occasions between 2008 and 2010. She was a senior member of the previous Government, so can she tell the House whether she supported that measure?

[Yvette Cooper]

I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman needs to understand that biometric checks increased every year under the Labour Government; his Government have undermined them and rolled them back. What is the point of Britain investing loads of money in biometric technology and passports, if we then switch off the system every time a European citizen goes through it? What on earth is the point of that investment, which our Government supported and were extending and rolling out, but which the hon. Gentleman’s party and his Government seem to have backed off from and ditched, undermining the border controls that are in place?

[Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. We are listening with great interest to her rewriting of history. Does she not agree that the Government of whom she was a member left the system in a real mess? This Government are trying to improve things and clear up the problem.

[Yvette Cooper]

If this is what the hon. Gentleman calls improving things—dearie me. We should be strengthening controls. Those controls had been strengthened, year on year, but in my view they should have gone further. We should be doing more to roll out e-Borders and extend biometrics. He does not seem to realise that his Home Secretary removed the biometric checks. She has been undermining many of the checks that should have been taking place.

Secondly, we need to know who authorised what, because serious allegations have now been made, both by the Home Secretary against a senior civil servant and by a senior civil servant against the Home Secretary. Her advisers seem to have briefed the newspapers that Brodie Clark was a rogue official. She told the House that he had taken responsibility and that she would make sure that “those responsible are punished”. He has said that her statements were wrong. The Home Secretary has a history of high-level spats, but this is considerably more serious than a political row over immigration and the future of cats; this is a dispute over the security of our borders. We need to know what advice she was given. What were the precise terms of the pilots that she signed off? What was communicated to the UK Border Agency about her decision? Was the memo—which I know she is aware of—from the Border Agency saying that it would cease routine biometric checks of EU citizens cleared by her, the Minister for Immigration or Home Office officials? Is it an accurate or inaccurate reflection of the instructions that were sent out from her office, or the description of the pilot in the submission that she received and signed off?

[Matthew Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

Again, I notice that the Home Secretary is silent, so I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Matthew Hancock]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. However, she has not yet mentioned the fact that Rob Whiteman, Mr Clark’s boss, has said that Mr Clark overstepped and did more than was authorised by Ministers. That is why he had to be suspended.

[Yvette Cooper]

We now have different accounts from different officials, the Home Secretary and the memos from the Border Agency that have been revealed. What the public want to know is the truth. That is why we need the information to be published. We need to know what information the Home Secretary gave to the Border Agency, what instructions were given to the Border Agency and what instructions were given by the Minister for Immigration. What information was provided to Ministers from the Border Agency? What monitoring did they ask for? What monitoring did her Minister for Immigration do? By the way, it is good to see him here today. He has been completely silent and absent from this entire debate. Indeed, in the light of these revelations, we wonder what job he is in fact doing. What information did either Minister ask for when they decided to extend the pilot just six weeks ago?

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

Is it not crucial that we know Mr Clark’s version of events? We look forward to his giving evidence next Tuesday, because so far we have simply had the Home Secretary. Why should a senior civil servant of 40 years standing wish to mislead us or give a wrong impression to Parliament?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right: we need to hear Brodie Clark’s evidence to the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which will be important. However, we also need to know what it says in the instructions that the Home Secretary’s office gave to the Border Agency. That by itself should clear a lot of this up. What did she decide? What were her instructions to the Border Agency? Has it accurately reflected those instructions or not? She should publish that information and those data. Let us get to the bottom of what has been going on.

Thirdly, the Home Secretary needs to provide us with more information and assurances about resources. It is clear from the internal memo and from the Border Agency that staff were under pressure. One internal management e-mail says:

“If we aren’t using level 2”—

the reduced level of checks—

“the assumption is we won’t be using secondary staff to support any pressures…as you know, this is a message we have put out time and time again…We cannot continue to pull resources from other parts of our business when we are not making use of all the tools available to us”.

In other words, the Border Agency was not allowed to ask for extra staff when things got busy unless it had already downgraded to a lower level of checks.

People do not like queues when they come back from holiday—the kids are crying, it is very stressful, or perhaps they are late for a business meeting—but they stand there, looking at all the empty booths, and thinking, “Why aren’t the extra staff put on? Why aren’t the extra lines open?” Now we know the answer: because the Border Agency has been told that it has to cut the checks that are in place. Some 6,500 staff are going from the Border Agency, with 1,500 going from the border force, including more than 800 this year alone. The Prime Minister told the House with great pride that the level of staff was returning to the level of 2006. Really? I have to say that I do not think that border controls were strong enough in 2006. We were right to strengthen them and to keep strengthening them. [Interruption.] If Government Members really want to roll back the clock and reduce the checks and border controls that are in place across this country, they are completely out of touch with their constituents across the country, who want to see proper immigration controls in place.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Lady think that the border controls were ever strict enough under the last Government? Let me tell her that my constituents will never forgive that Government for letting in 2.2 million people, a population twice that of our nearest city, Birmingham.

[Yvette Cooper]

It was right to increase and strengthen those border controls and to increase biometric checks. However, if the hon. Lady wants to intervene again, I have to ask her: does she agree with the pilot that her Home Secretary introduced, which reduced those biometric checks and removed checks against the watch list for EU children?

[Margot James]

I will not presume to comment on the decisions that the Home Secretary made, but I will say this. It was quite—[Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

This is a pilot that covered millions of people over many months and has led to Home Secretary being unable to tell us how many people have wrongly been allowed into this country as a result.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

If Government Back Benchers want to declaim their support for the pilot, I will happily allow them to do so.

[Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)]

I appreciate the right hon. Lady’s generosity in giving way again. Does what she has said about 2006 mean that she agrees with the mea culpa—I think that was the phrase—of the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee when he said that the problem started under her Labour Government?

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree that Labour Home Secretaries were right to increase the controls and to increase new technology, which is why I am so shocked that Conservative Ministers and the Conservative party are so enthusiastic about rolling back those border checks now. We have seen that the scale of the cuts is putting pressure on the UK Border Agency just as the scale of cuts to policing is putting pressure on community safety. People across the country fear that corners are being cut and that border security is being put at risk by the scale of the Government’s border cuts. This needs to be sorted out. We have had the embarrassing spectacle of a Home Secretary who does not know what she agreed to, how it was being implemented or how great the security risks were.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a question not simply of cuts, but of competence. Whether with Building Schools for the Future or the selling off of forests, this Government are simply not fit for purpose.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. The most shocking thing of all is that the Government do not seem to know what has been happening on their watch.

Time and again, Ministers have blamed the previous Labour Government and civil servants, but the Home Secretary might want to think back to “Question Time” in 2004 and a debate with the then Immigration Minister, Beverley Hughes. The current Home Secretary said at that time that she found it

“absolutely extraordinary that she’s…blamed officials in her department for this decision to be taken…I’m sick and tired of government ministers…who simply blame other people when things go wrong.”

Indeed, Home Secretary.

The House does not expect the Home Secretary to know every detail of what is going on in the agencies for which she is responsible all the time, but we expect her to get on top of things and to sort them out when they go wrong.

Five days on, the public still do not know what on earth has been going on in the Home Office and at our borders. Time and again, this Home Secretary has not been on top of the facts and has not taken action to sort things out. She seems to be making things worse.

We cannot afford a Home Secretary who cannot cope with a crisis or sort out a fiasco. Border security and public safety are too important for us to have a Home Secretary whose authority is continually being sapped. She cannot blame the previous Government and she cannot blame officials. It is her watch. She needs to provide the facts that she has been unable to provide so far and to provide the answers, and she needs to do so today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

The operational instruction did reflect Government policy because it allowed for a risk-based assessment when opening the biometric chip of EEA passports and checking EEA national children against the warnings index when they were travelling with parents or as part of a school party.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has just made an extremely important statement. She said that the UK Border Agency’s interim operational instruction did reflect Government policy. That operational instruction says

“We will cease:

Routinely opening the chip within EEA passports.

Routinely checking all EEA nationals under 18 years against the Warnings index” .

If that is Government policy, it is little wonder that, across the country, people have been routinely stopping doing the biometric checks in EU passports and stopping doing the watch index checks. The instruction does not say “Only in exceptional or limited circumstances”. It says “We will cease routinely” to do those checks.

[Mrs May]

The whole point is that they were allowed, in certain circumstances, not to open the chip—[Interruption.] The whole point is that they were allowed, in certain circumstances, not to check children against the warnings index. And the whole point is that officers were allowed to exercise their discretion.

Where the instruction says that officers should escalate further measures, it refers of course to the warnings index checking policy put in place in 2007 under the Government of which the right hon. Lady was a member. I have to tell the right hon. Lady that the quotes she has been eagerly e-mailing around the Lobby come from a policy put in place by her own Government.

The right hon. Lady referred to staff numbers. What she failed to tell the House was that in April 2010 the Labour Government had already announced that they would cut the budget and the staff of the UK Border Agency.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has not answered an extremely important question. She has accused officials of going much further, of using routinely the reduced checks that she wanted in only limited circumstances. That is one of her main allegations—officials going further than her decision and her advice. The interim operational instruction that the Home Secretary says reflects Government policy and was her intention is described as “Trial of risk-based processes at the border,” and states:

“We will... Cease routinely opening the chip within EEA passports.”

The document goes on to talk about discretion, but the discretion is to go further, not to cease the process only in limited circumstances. Will the right hon. Lady now recognise that the document shows that her intention and her policy were substantially to expand the reduction of checks for EEA citizens across the country and to reduce controls at our border?

[Mrs May]

I answered that point on Monday, on Tuesday and this afternoon. The right hon. Lady knows full well what was in the pilot I authorised.

The right hon. Lady asked what information was given to Ministers when we decided to extend the pilot programme. As I told the Select Committee yesterday, Ministers were provided with four updates on the progress of the pilot prior to the agreement to extend it. The updates provided information about seizures of drugs and detection of illegal immigrants. They did not refer to unauthorised actions; in fact, they explicitly said that officials were sticking to the terms of the pilot and not going beyond them.

The right hon. Lady asked about child trafficking. I answered that question on Monday in the House and before the Home Affairs Committee yesterday. For the information of the House, in 2010, 8 million EEA-national children were checked against the warnings index. An alert came up for one child, and after further questioning the child was allowed in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Green]

I know how strongly the hon. Gentleman feels about the Larne and Stranraer issue, but it is not an international port. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom; boats that come from Northern Ireland to Scotland are not crossing an international boundary. That is a fact that the hon. Gentleman needs to recognise.

The pilot was designed to improve security at our ports and to strengthen our border. Several Opposition Members said they believed that it was not being monitored and that no information was being passed to the Home Secretary or me during the course of the pilot, but of course that was not the case. We were getting regular information from management about what was happening, and it was telling us that there was a 10% increase in the detection of illegal immigrants, a 48% increase in fraudulent documents detected, and that cocaine seizures and illegal firearms seizures were up.

[Yvette Cooper]

rose—

[Damian Green]

Before I give way to the right hon. Lady, will she answer the following question? If the figures for the pilot had gone the other way—if detections were down, the number of fraudulent documents detected were down, and drug seizures were down—would she not be calling for a debate to argue that the pilot was a failure? Why is she calling a debate now when, as far as we can see, this pilot was a success?

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

If the hon. Gentleman’s pilot was such a success, he will need to explain why he has now suspended it. There is an important question that the Home Secretary ducked earlier about the management data that were available—I refer to the information about how many times the checks were downgraded to level 2. How many times did that take place over the summer? Has the Minister seen that information? If so, will he publish it? We know that the information exists.

[Damian Green]

That is precisely the information that the various investigations are looking at, but what the right hon. Lady has to recognise is that, without the authorisation of Ministers, senior UK border officials are alleged to have ordered the regular relaxation of border checks. They also went beyond the pilot that Ministers had agreed. Biometric checks on European economic area nationals and warnings index checks on EEA national children were abandoned on a regular basis, without approval, and adults were not checked against the warnings index at Calais, without approval.

What the pilot was designed to do—I hope that there will be some consensus on this across the House—was to have a risk-based approach. I say that there should be some consensus, because having a proper risk-based approach to immigration control has been the basis of our policy on both immigration and wider security since 9/11. I was grateful for the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) on that point. It is obviously sensible to concentrate our effort and resources in those areas where they are likely to have most effect on making our borders safe. I cannot believe that there is a Member in any part of this House who disagrees with that. That is what we approved.

On the point about queues which was raised by several hon. Members, including the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins), there is of course permanent pressure for shorter queues; there is pressure from Members of this House. I have to tell the right hon. Gentleman that whenever I come back in the autumn—I suspect this was the case for any previous Immigration Minister—I hear tales of woe about queues at Heathrow, but it is absolutely the first responsibility of the Home Office to make sure that we do not compromise security. That is what this pilot—that is what a risk-based approach—is designed to do.

What happened that went beyond authority was that the verification of the fingerprints of non-EEA nationals from countries that require a visa was stopped on regular occasions, without approval.

Oral Answers to Questions

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend is returning to topics that I know he has pursued for some considerable time. Obviously, there was significant use of CCTV. That is why this Government continue to support its use.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I welcome the Home Secretary’s decision to instigate an inquiry into border control this summer, which we will discuss shortly, but let me ask her a security question: what is her estimate of the number of people who passed into Britain through our ports and airports this summer under the reduced security and passport regime that the UK Border Agency was operating?

[Mrs May]

As the right hon. Lady knows, I will make a full statement to the House later this afternoon, and will have a full opportunity to answer her questions then, but I should like to make a few things clear. In the past, under the last Government, some security checks were lifted at times of pressure on the border, including one instance when local managers at Heathrow terminal 3 decided to open controls and no checks were made—not even cursory checks of passports.

To prevent that from happening again and to allow resources to be focused on the highest-risk passengers and journeys, in July I agreed that UKBA could pilot a scheme that would allow border force officials to target intelligence-led checks on higher-risk categories of travellers. We have since discovered that Brodie Clark, the head of the UK border force, authorised the wider relaxation of border controls without ministerial sanction. As I said, I shall make a statement to the House later today and will answer questions on this matter fully then.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary did not answer my question on how many people went through under the reduced security regime, and I am concerned that she does not know. As she will know, previously, both Labour and Conservative Ministers have committed to the roll-out of e-Borders so that proper screening could be available for everyone entering and leaving the country. She seems to be rolling that system back, not forward. When describing the rolling back of checks for EU citizens this summer, a UKBA staff member told me, “We were told not to check children travelling with family groups. That was ridiculous. Supposing a man…had taken them away from their mother and they were wards of court, they would pass through undetected. I have detected many wards of court simply by running them through the warnings index.”

The Home Secretary took the decision to reduce the checks for EU citizens this summer. Why did she do so?

[Mrs May]

As I have indicated to the right hon. Lady, I shall set out exactly what decisions were taken in my statement to the House later today. I indicated in my first answer to her that we were looking at targeting intelligence-led checks on higher risk categories of travellers. She referred to e-Borders, but this has nothing to do with e-Borders. When we took office, we had to stop the contract with the contractor that the last Labour Government agreed for e-Borders because it was significantly behind schedule in putting it in place.