Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to her Department's blog post, Border Force recruitment, published in August 2019, how many of the Border Force officers trained for no deal will be empowered to carry out customs tasks under section 3 of the Borders, Immigration and Citizenship Act 2009; and how many of those officers will be based in (a) Scotland and (b) the rest of the UK.

Border Force resource and staffing requirements are continually reviewed, and we deploy resources flexibly as and when they are required. Border Force will continue to build a pipeline of resource to flexibly respond to future requirements.

We?have already delivered a largescale recruitment and training exercise, which has seen an uplift of permanent staff, bringing the number of full-time equivalent Border Force staff to over 8,700 from c7,700 in March 2018. This includes a multi-disciplinary Readiness Task Force (RTF) of c.300 officers, which is available to deploy across the?UK?at short notice to deal with emerging issues and peaks in demand.

We are working closely across government to ensure we have the necessary trained staff, processes and infrastructure in place to respond to the increased custom checks from January in 2021.