“The trial delivered into the border business exactly as she wished. I did not enlarge, extend or redefine the scope in any way.”
Brodie Clark, 15 November 2011
The background
Theresa May is fighting to hold on to her job after an explosive appearance from the former chief of the UK Border Force at the Home Affairs Select Committee.
The Home Secretary has insisted that the decision to relax some of the UK border checks designed to stop terrorists and criminals from entering the country was made by Mr Clark without her authority.
Brodie Clark flatly contradicted that on Tuesday, saying: “I am no rogue officer. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
He added: “I was meticulous for holding to the terms the Home Secretary put in place.”
It seems that someone must be misleading Parliament. What do we know about the borders scandal, and what do we still need to know?
The analysis
In December 2010, Mr Clark began asking ministers if he could change the way routine checks are carried out at entry points into the UK.
He said some of the blanket checks were wasting his officers’ time. Of eight million checks made of schoolchildren against the Warnings Index of banned foreign nationals last year, only one turned out to be dubious.
Ministers agreed that to a limited pilot scheme aimed at freeing up UKBA staff from broad checks of limited value so they could concentrate on intelligence-led work.
What was agreed in the pilot?
Theresa May agreed that border officials should be allowed to use their discretion on opening up the passports of EU nationals to check a second photograph rather than doing it as a matter of course.
Checks were also relaxed on EU children travelling with their parents or in a school group. Both changes were only supposed to happen “under limited circumstances”.
Mr Clark also asked ministers to relax the rules around checking non-EU citizens’ fingerprints, but this was explicitly ruled out.
What really happened?
Mrs May says border staff were found to be regularly going beyond the terms of the pilot scheme. She says biometric checks on EU citizens and warning checks on their children “were abandoned on a regular basis without ministerial approval”.
Adults were also not checked against the warnings index at Calais. And there were occasions when the fingerprints of non-EU nationals from countries that require a visa were not checked.
She has revealed for the first time this week that 28 ports and airports took part in the pilot between July and November: Aberdeen, Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bristol, Calais, Cardiff, Coquelles, East Midlands, Edinburgh, Exeter, Gatwick, Glasgow, Harwich, Heathrow, Leeds Bradford, Liverpool, London City, Luton, Manchester, Newcastle, Newhaven, Norwich, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Prestwick and Stansted.
Emails leaked by Labour suggest that the relaxed checks were used at least 2,600 times over the summer, but it appears that we’ll never know exactly how many people were affected.
What does Mr Clark say?
He doesn’t dispute that there were indeed times when checks were relaxed further than had been agreed with ministers.
Mr Clark told MPs that there were more than 50 occasions between May and July when fingerprint checking of non-EU nationals with visas was abandoned at Heathrow Airport. And Warnings Index checks for adults were suspended at Calais more than 100 times, MPs were told.
The reason given for both of these situations was Mrs May’s old friend ‘elf and safety.
Specifically, Mr Clark said the managers of ports are allowed to relax checks if they fear there is a health and safety crisis in the offing – for example, if planes circling Heathrow are unable to land because of massive queues inside the airport.
He says this has been “standard practice” since 2007, when Home Office guidance was issued on the subject, and had nothing to do with the pilot.
He said he “would be surprised” if Mrs May or Immigration Minister Damian Green “did not know of those policies or understand them”.
What does Rob Whiteman say?
The new chief executive of UKBA, and the man who suspended Mr Clark, contradicts this, saying: “Ministers were not aware of any older policy that was being used to not check against the warnings index.”
He said the 2007 guidance predated the use of routine fingerprint checks, and in any event was only designed to cover genuine health and safety emergencies.
He added: “The use of the provisions 100 times is greater than is likely to have been caused by significant health and safety problems.
“I think that the health and safety provisions were being used routinely rather than only being used in those circumstances. I think Brodie Clark and senior officials would have been aware of that.”
Did the pilot work?
Mr Clark and Mrs May both say there was nothing wrong with the actual theory behind their move to more intelligence-led border checks. They say the pilot was actually a roaring success in termns of drug seizures and improvements in other areas of security.
David Cameron came out with a list of impressive statistics in the Commons, but the Home Office has so far refused to release the figures to back up his claims, either to FactCheck or to the select committee.
But it seems UKBA did release some figures to selected journalists last week. The briefing, which apparently boasted of a massive rise in seizures of heroin and cocaine, has prompted a complaint from the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar.
He said it was “highly selective in its choice of statistics, in order, it seems to show the UK Border Agency in a good light”.
What do we still need to know?
The 2007 health and safety guidance is “restricted”, and the Home Office won’t be making it public, we’re told, so the question of whether Mr Clark or Mr Whiteman is giving the most honest account of its contents will have to wait for another day.
And, despite briefing some journalists, the Home Office has failed to provide FactCheck with statistics on the success of the pilot.
And emails that passed between Mr Clark and Mr Whiteman which could shed more light on how much ministers knew are also confidential for now. The select committee asked Mr Whiteman to hand them over and were enraged by his cagey reply.
The verdict
Faced with this kind of information blackout, it’s difficult to come to a firm conclusion yet. There’s little evidence that Mr Clark wilfully went beyond the terms of the pilot agreed with Theresa May – and no one has been able to come up with a convincing explanation of why he would want to “go rogue” like that.
On the other hand, if he was party to a situation where border staff were routinely scaling down checks under the flag of health and safety without ministers knowing about it, public opinion could yet come down on the side of the beleaguered Home Secretary.
