LONDON – British home secretary Theresa May last night faced Labour demands to disclose whether any terror suspects are believed to have entered the country 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 today that urgent steps were needed to establish whether the public was at risk.
In a letter to Ms 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.
Ms May is due to make a statement to the Commons tomorrow.
According to reports, border guards were told this summer not to bother checking biometric chips on passports of non-EU citizens. They were instructed not to bother checking fingerprints and other details against a database of terror suspects and illegal immigrants, it was claimed. Sue Smith, of the Public and Commercial Services Union, blamed what she claimed had been a 10 per cent reduction in border force staff. – (PA)