Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many alerts were issued by the National Border Targeting Centre to the regional offices of Border Force relating to flights of potential interest in each of the last five years.

The National Border Targeting Centre issue alerts to both police and Border Force officials at the UK border. The figures provided record those alerts raised for Immigration or Customs reasons at the Border, and do not include any police alerts.

In 2013 Border Force implemented a quality assurance procedure of Border Force alerts which were being disseminated to the frontline. You will see that in 2012, alerts steadily dropped. Alert ratios reduced due to a more stringent alert framework being adopted by the agency. Alerts were of a higher quality and specifically directed to manage the threat to the Border depending on the priorities of the Border Control Strategy and threat assessment.

Year Alert count

2011 16,694

2012 15,864

2013 11,076

2014 10,516

2015 10,167