The Home Affairs Committee has said it cannot see how the government will fulfil its promise to deliver 100% exit checks at Britain’s major cross-Channel terminals.
The checks, due to start on 8 April, will allow the government to confirm travellers’ exit from the UK, which will help it monitor immigration and allow police to track known criminals and terrorists.
In a report entitled ‘The work of the Immigration Directorates: Calais’ released last week, the Home Affairs Committee said the government will need to make greater exemptions than just coachloads of under 16s, the only known exemption to the checks at this time, if the scheme is to succeed.
It also queried a quote from James Brokenshire, minister for immigration and security, who in February said the pledge would be met for “100% of those within the scope of the programme”, with no further clarification of what that scope was.
The report demands that the government should have supplied the committee with an exhaustive list of which vehicles fall within the scope of the programme no later than 27 March, along with an estimated percentage of passengers whose passports will be checked.
The FTA has previously voiced concerns about the manual passport checks, saying that checking the passport of every person leaving the UK would cause chaos in the port and surrounding roads, possibly leading to the regular implementation of Operation Stack on Kent motorways.
Don Armour, the FTA’s international affairs manager, said: “We have already said that we are not convinced that the proposed passport checking system has been thought through properly, or that it is as robust as officials would have us believe, and as a result we believe it will cause delays at the ports and exit points – and chaos on the roads leading to
departure.”
The FTA has said that it would like to see vehicles with single occupants separated from those with multiple passengers at the check points in order to boost the efficiency of the operation.
