Speeches and Statements

UK Border Agency launched

Speech by Liam Byrne, Minister of State for Borders and Immigration, to staff of the new UK Border Agency at HM Treasury on 3 April 2008. The text below is as prepared.

It is a great pleasure to be able to speak to you today to celebrate the launch of the new UK Border Agency. 

In January I promised that by day 100 this year we would introduce a new agency to guard our ports and airports. I am delighted to announce we have hit our target a few days early. And I am delighted to launch the agency’s first business plan for the three years ahead.

Many of you here today have been not only instrumental but inspirational in assembling the plans to make the new agency possible. I want to thank you for everything that you have done and everything you are going to do in the year ahead. I believe today’s plans herald a new agency with the purpose, the powers and the punch to protect our border in the 21st Century. 

The purpose is clear. To secure our border and control migration for the benefit our country.  

That means we will protect our borders and our national interests. That means we will tackle border tax fraud, smuggling and immigration crime and facilitate the legitimate movement of people and goods. That means we will stop things like firearms, drugs and paedophile material from entering our country. That means we will implement decisions quickly and fairly.

This is nothing more or less than what the public is demanding of us today.  If you ask the public what is fore most in their mind at the moment, and depending on what month you ask the question, they will say either crime or immigration. And when we ask those who were concerned about migration what action they want to see from the Government then amongst the top two or three things that you will hear is strong border security.

I believe that the public has got it right; I believe that pressure on our borders in the years to come will grow unless we take concerted action today.

The future of migration

We know that since the 1960s migration has doubled. Today there is an international community of migrants that is bigger than the population of Brazil. Yet look to the years to come. 

The World Bank estimates that nearly a billion people will join the labour market in the developing world between 2001 and 2025. And we know that migrants can increase their income five fold by moving from low income to high income countries. 

That means that countries across the west will face new challenges from the new movement of people in the years to come. And that is why we must act today to take precautions for the future. 

Few people I speak to want in Britain want a country that is cut adrift from the world with borders sealed impermeable and forever to the outside world. We have always been a trading nation. It is what has made this country over the centuries great. 

What people in this country want us to deliver are borders that are protected, protected so that authorised travellers and legitimate goods can pass freely. That is the vital purpose that you must hold centre-stage.

Second, what we announce today is an agency with powers to do the job. 

Indeed no other agency in the country is as powerful as the UK Border Agency in the pursuit of the purpose I have set out.

By bringing together Customs powers which date back centuries and immigration powers and combining them in the hands of our frontline staff I believe we will have put the right power in the right place to keep this country safe. 

Like powers to board and search vehicles or planes or trains to search for people or goods, the power to stop and question, the power to search, the power to seize things that we believe should not be moving into our country, the power to detain an individual. 

Where needed our front-line staff will have designated powers under the Terrorism Act powers to support the fight against terrorism. 

Today the Home Secretary has announced to Parliament that in this first phase of change by the summer, 1,000 of our frontline officers will be cross conferred with both immigration and customs powers.

By Christmas 1,000 will be equipped with powers to detain, and search under the UK Borders Act. And I am confirming today that the Government will bring forward legislation shortly to ensure that there is a modern legislative basis for the new agency as it goes about its job in 2008. 

Working with the police

To add to our strength we are also able to announce a new relationship with the police. 

The Home Secretary has laid in the House of Commons this afternoon a new Memorandum of Understanding with the Association of Chief Police Officers that sets out how the UK Border Agency will work with the 1,400 Special Branch and the 1,600 uniformed police personnel deployed at ports and airports all over the UK.

We have already welcomed a Chief Constable – Roger Baker – to help lead our business, as a member of the agency board.

Talks will continue with the police at how we draw together police forces in this country with the new agency. 

In particular, I want to thank Lord Stevens the Advisor to the Prime Minister on border security for the kick start that he is given to talks which Tony McNulty and I are hosting with ACPO.  It is right that an agency that is more powerful is asked to deliver more for British taxpayers. 

It is right however that wherever the exercise of powers is wide, accountability must be wide. That is why the IPCC agreed to take over inspection of individual cases from 25 February.

And that is why I will bring into force a new and far more powerful Inspectorate for the new agency legislated for the UK Borders Act and which will now be in place to hold the UK Border Agency to Parliament, the public, and Ministers.

I am pleased to be able to say that we will announce the new inspector very shortly.

A unique agency

Third, it is vital that the new Agency packs the punch it needs to do its job. 

In a sense the sheer size of the new force is one of the best guarantees.  The new agency will marshal resources of over £2 billion. It will deploy over 25,000 staff. It will employ over 9,000 warranted officers. That makes the agency the second largest body of warranted officers in the country

But the UK Border Agency will be unique in its span. 

Over the last year and a half I have studied similar changes in both Australia and America.  What neither nation did was take the steps that we are taking today. Because not only are we bringing together our customs and immigration forces, we are combining our overseas visa staff as well. This gives the new agency a span that stretches from local communities up and down the UK, to 13,000 staff deployed at our borders to nearly 3,000 officials in 135 countries around the world.

The UK Border Agency will be unique in that its presence is local but its reach is global. But the strength of the new agency will best deployed if it is deployed with intelligence.

So at the heart of the UK Border Agency will be a border intelligence service bringing together forces of our risk assessment units all over the world with our airline liaison officers, with customs intelligence officers and with the immigration intelligence service into a single network.

At the heart of this new service will be our Joint Border Operating Centre – a £1.2 billion system  - which will by Christmas be screening in and out of the UK the majority of foreign nationals.

Combined with our global fingerprint systems now recording the identities and checking the identities of everybody who apply for a visa, this new capability gives the UK Border Agency a unique ability to spot trouble at a distance and keep it there if we don’t like the look of it. And this ability to keep trouble away allows us to do too is speed the passage of legitimate travel and trade. 

As the Foreign Secretary has said in his speech to Chatham House last year the UK is today a global hub where capital and ideas and people move and stick.

It is an ecology that is easily disrupted as many countries have found over the last five years that is not a mistake the UK Border Agency will make. 

Delivering results

And so our business plan that I launch today makes quite clear that we will accelerate the deployment of new systems to automate border crossing for those whose identity and whose background we trust and we will redouble our efforts to facilitate the passage of legitimate trade in and out of the UK.

Over the last 12 months you have delivered unprecedented results.

200 million passenger movements through our ports. 

Trade flows amounted to £600 billion leading to the collection of £22 billion in revenue. 

You acted to screen over 3 and a half million vehicles for illegal radiological materials. 

You searched over a million lorries and cars in Northern France.  Around the world you stopped nearly 50,000 people before they got on flights to the UK. 

On the other side of the Channel 18,000 people who were seeking to enter our country clandestinely were stopped and turned back.  At our exit checks 9000 immigration offenders were stopped and recorded and locked out of the country.  

Around 1 billion cigarettes and 150 tons of hand-rolling tobacco were seized at the border.  Indications are that seizures of class A drugs have exceeded last year’s total. Over 2,300 kilograms of cocaine and over 500 kilograms of heroin poison targeted on the streets of Britain were stopped at our borders.

We exceeded our target of removing over 4000 foreign national prisoners those who had broken the law. We removed over 13,000 people whose asylum claim had failed in that in total we removed an immigration offender every 8 minutes. In country customs colleagues seized over £13 million of criminal money. 

We conducted 40 per cent more illegal working operations that we conducted against those employing people illegally, with the result of over 5,000 immigration offenders. 

Abroad we processed and reviewed over 2 and a half million applications for permission to come to the UK. Over 128,000 work permits were issued 38 per cent to people who work in health, medicine or information technology. 220,000 foreign students came to this country attracting an estimated £8.5 billion to our economy.

In other words, you made last year an extraordinary contribution to keeping this country both prosperous and peaceful.

But a more powerful agency needs tougher targets

So next year I want to see:

• expel 5,000 foreign national prisoners from Britain, up from 4,200 last year
• sustain last year’s increase in the seizure of class A drugs by seizing at least 2,400 kilograms of cocaine and 550 kilograms of heroin by April 2009
• increase by 50 per cent the number of cases concluded in less than 6 months
• extend the UK’s visas regime to cover a larger proportion of the world’s population
• increase our detention capacity by 20 per cent over the next two years to help us increase the number of immigration offenders we can remove from the country

My commitment is to back our new force with new resources. That is why next year we will increase our budget for our border force by 10 per cent - that is an extra £23 million. We will help provide this money by cutting red tape by cutting headquarters costs focusing our resources on our priorities. 

We have already delivered on our efficiency targets to remove 640 people from our headquarters. This year we will set a 5 per cent efficiency target – amongst the toughest in Whitehall - to ensure that we are focusing our resources on the frontline first.

The vast majority of the travelling public and the traders who keep this country on the move play by the rules. I hope that what they will see at our borders courteous professional and proud organisation that speeds them on their way.

At our borders the public will notice, border controls that look robust. They will see our customs and immigration staff in a single uniform. They will see a primary checkpoint at passport control where they will be asked about not only their travel documents but the goods that they are carrying. They will see activities that we associate with customs like drugs scanning, sniffer dogs in the passport halls.

These changes I hope will not prove too much of an inconvenience to the legitimate travelling public and to our legitimate traders.

Rising to the challenge

The big changes will of course be behind the scenes.  I strongly believe that the creation of the UK Border Agency is a vital step in protecting our borders for the years to come. 

Over the last six months I have travelled thousands of miles around ports and airports across the UK talking to customs and immigration and visa staff about the changes that we need to make. 

Wherever I have gone I have been struck by both the pride and the professionalism and the purpose that people bring to work. The staff that I have talked to are up for this change. They come to work because they believe in this country, they believe in their mission to keep this country safe and they believe in their mission to keep this country prosperous and on the move. 

It is that dedication combined with a sense of tradition and an eye on the future that I believe are the vital assets in helping make sure that in this year the first shadow year of the UK Border Agency we put in place foundations that will create a new public institution in this country over which you and the public will be well and truly proud.

The eyes of many will be on you and me as we set about our work in this year ahead.

I give you my thanks and I wish you good luck.