Theresa May ‘must reveal if terror suspects passed into UK’

Home Secretary Theresa May is facing demands to disclose whether any terror suspects are believed to have entered the UK when border controls were secretly relaxed this summer.

Hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have entered Britain without being checked against the Home Office warnings index of suspected terrorists and illegal immigrants.

The head of the UK border force, Brodie Clark, has been suspended and an inquiry has been set up under John Vine, chief inspector of the UK Border Agency. But shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper insisted yesterday that urgent steps were needed to establish whether the public was at risk.

In a letter to Mrs May, she said: “The first, and crucial, step must be to ascertain the implications of the lapses in security and passport checks.

“In particular we need to know whether anyone posing a threat to Britain’s national security was allowed to enter the UK during the period where the decision of ministers to relax passport checks was taken further than the Home Office has said was ordered.”

Ms Cooper said the public were “understandably appalled and shocked” at the reported failings at the UK Border Agency and urged that Mr Vine’s inquiry be “all-encompassing”, covering the Home Office, ministerial decision-making and cuts to staff numbers.

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) has claimed that border controls were relaxed to keep queues down despite cuts to personnel. It also said the decision was authorised by ministers. Mrs May is due to make a statement to the Commons today.

According to reports, border guards were told this summer not to bother checking biometric chips on the passports of citizens from outside the European Union to ensure they are not fraudsters.

The guards were also instructed not to bother checking fingerprints and other personal details against a Home Office database of terror suspects and illegal immigrants, it was claimed.

Sue Smith, of the PCS, blamed what she claimed had been a 10 per cent reduction in border force staff.

“The travelling public understandably want to have a fast and efficient service, and yet we are also under a reduced workforce,” she said.

“So, I think senior managers have seen this as a way to provide the public with what they want.”

She added that senior managers had told the union that the changes to border checks had been made with the authorisation of ministers.

“As far as our staff were concerned, this was all done with ministerial authority, and that’s the information we have received,” she said.

Shadow Home Office minister Chris Bryant claimed that ministers had told borders staff to “cut some corners” and said Mrs May should “face the music” herself.

“It seems as if what’s happened was that ministers’ advice in July was actually precisely to do that: to cut some corners because there was a shortage of staff in particular between six o’clock and eight o’clock in the morning and in the evening,” he said.

Mr Bryant called for the publication of all the paperwork between ministers and the UK Borders Agency.