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10 July 2007 : Column 359WH—continued
In the past couple of days, various events have caused us all to tremble slightly. No innocent individual was killed or seriously injured at Glasgow, and thank goodness for that. However, we have heard—perhaps the Minister can comment on this—that there was not a single armed policeman at the airport. That suggests that the security culture has broken down somewhere or that it has been focused only on Heathrow. If so, other airports and their vulnerabilities, which the hon. Member for Middlesbrough, South and East Cleveland (Dr. Kumar)
discussed, will then become the obvious point of weakness for attack. Our approach therefore surely needs to be comprehensive.
We have heard the comments made by Mr. Ron Noble, the head of Interpol, who complained that the UK, among many other countries, does not take advantage of Interpol information when doing passport checks, and he asks that we participate in a watch list. There should be a real review of that issue. Sharing information obviously has consequences, and I would not want the Government wildly to share information with anyone who just happened to be signed up to Interpol, without being confident that there was genuine security. However, the issue must be reviewed, and it would make sense to deal with it with a greater urgency and to give it greater priority to ensure that we take full advantage of the passport checking facilities offered by Interpol, particularly where missing and stolen passports are concerned.
Last week, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg), who speaks on home affairs for my party, raised some issues with the Home Secretary. The Minister will be aware that vehicle access barriers have been under review, and there have been some pilot schemes at Victoria and Waterloo. Given the vulnerability of airports, I wonder why the scheme has not been rolled out. A report on how the technology was to be rolled out was due in April, but I have not heard any of the results. Any information that the Minister had in that regard would be important, particularly in the current circumstances.
I join the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Donohoe) in saying that it is worth looking at the comments of the US Air Line Pilots Association. As he said, it has criticised the UK for focusing on objects—sometimes these objects are rather weird, and the approach is not consistent across Europe—rather than on behavioural patterns and profiling to identify threats. I recognise that there are real risks with the proposed approach, which must be undertaken with an awareness of the fact that any kind of profiling can create real problems. Indeed, I would prefer something that looked at behavioural patterns, rather than just at some crude form of profiling. I say that in a very personal sense, because, as the Minister may know, my husband was an American, and he travelled frequently between the two continents over the 35 years that we were together. My daughter’s partner is a black American, and I have seen vividly how the way in which he is treated at Heathrow differs from the way in which my husband, who was also an American, was treated—the word “appalling” is probably not an understatement.
That brings to me to my next issue. If security is to be sustainable, and if people are to be willing to go through intrusive checks that make their journey more difficult and require increased planning, there must be a level of care and customer service that makes the process acceptable and shows genuine respect. That includes treating those coming through immigration, or other travelling passengers, well—treating them thoughtfully and with politeness and real concern.
Several people have talked about the genuine inconsistencies that frustrate everybody. People cannot take their lighters through check-in, but they can buy them at the far end—excuse me, but that is starting to
get silly. British Airways has said again today that it is trying to link up 20,000 lost bags with their owners, but people do not have endless patience. Obviously, T5 will bring some benefits in terms of dealing with that set of issues, but it will not be a complete solution.
I travelled as a non-American in the US for many years—obviously, I was married to an American—and I was always treated with the greatest rudeness by every immigration officer I talked to. However, that has changed dramatically, as many more people have been caught up in the process.
Susan Kramer: All that I can say is that the hon. Gentleman did not see what it was like before. However, change is genuinely achievable.
Perhaps I can close with a few comments that have been made before by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam: if we are really going to have security, we need a national border force, bringing together the present border control functions of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the immigration and nationality directorate, and the police, with regard to both ports and airports. I shall not expound on that, but the Minister is, I think, very aware of that need. Also, we need to carry out exit checks. Those were taken away in 1994, but the Government seem to be dragging their feet about their reintroduction. I understand that, under present plans, they will not be in place until 2014, which is another generation.
I think that my time has run out; I congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire on obtaining the debate, and I hope that we shall hear from the Minister that airport security will be given the attention and priority that it deserves.
10.30 am
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con): I too congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Donohoe), both on securing the debate and on his revelation that he serves as a special constable in the British Transport police. I listened to his remarks with great interest and agreed with nearly all of them. I join everyone else who has spoken in congratulating the police, security staff and emergency services, and, indeed, the stout-hearted members of the public who intervened at Glasgow airport, reminding us what citizenship should be about.
We must start with the clarification of responsibilities. The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) was quite right to pick up that point from Sir John Wheeler’s report. It must be made crystal clear exactly who is responsible for what. There has been some progress, but there is still a degree of fragmentation. I also agree with the hon. Lady’s remark about a uniformed border force, something for which the Conservative party has been calling for a long time. That, however, is more to do with people coming into the country than with the matter before the House today.
It happens that I have some background on terrorist issues from my time in special forces. Between August
last year and February this year I had a series of exchanges, both written and in meetings, with the British Airports Authority about security at terminals, focusing on one central concern: that queues for security apparatus are seen as targets of choice by terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), I happened to fly—to America—a week or two after the August incident, and I share the concerns of many that the hold-ups here were much worse than those in any of the busy American airports that I went through. Indeed, in November, Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways, was moved to remark:
“We should accept that for so many of our customers...Heathrow isn’t working...In 25 years, Heathrow could be an aviation backwater, as relevant to the world economy of the mid-21st century as London’s former East End docks.”
Of course the flow at Heathrow has improved immeasurably since Mr Walsh said that, but I share his concerns. However, those concerns go far beyond economic competitiveness. The plain fact is that large numbers of people waiting for security apparatus, concentrated in an indoor location, provide an extremely tempting target for terrorists.
For obvious reasons, I did not make my exchanges with BAA public, but I can now reveal that at the meeting in which they culminated, on 7 February, its security manager pointed out to me that as well as providing extra scanners and staff BAA had installed bollards outside the approaches to all its terminals to prevent vehicular access. That, however, is not enough. It is perfectly obvious that any bomber—it need not even be a suicide bomber—can carry or wheel a large bomb in a suitcase straight into the middle of a queue. Those queues are extremely vulnerable and such large concentrations of people in the 21st century, which is, sadly, a terrorist era, are unacceptable.
It seems that our thinking has at every stage trailed behind the reality of the terrorist threat that we face, and that each time there is an attack we must learn, although fortunately, in the most recent case, not after people have died. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Government have been wilfully negligent. I am simply trying to understand why we have not quite grasped the nettle. As far back as November 2004 my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), who was then our homeland security spokesman, tabled a question to the Department of Transport asking for
“a statement on security inspections undertaken at British airports.”
“The Department carries out an extensive programme of aviation security compliance monitoring activity. This includes announced and unannounced inspections and tests of the security”. —[Official Report, 1 November 2004; Vol. 426, c. 8W.]
My hon. Friend tabled a similar question in January 2007 and the reply was:
“New aviation security measures which have been implemented at UK airports in light of August’s security alert include the controls on liquids and the limit on the number and maximum size of cabin bags. Other new measures which have been implemented since August are not visible”—
probably for very good reasons—
“to passengers.”—[Official Report, 30 January 2007; Vol. 456, c. 243W.]
I know that our excellent new homeland security spokesman, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, takes a very close interest in all this. Curiously, to my thinking, the Secretary of State makes no mention of access. Terrorists can go wherever the public go.
BAA has recruited hundreds of extra security staff and bought extra scanners. Increasing throughput and thus reducing queues is part of the solution, but we must also examine again the issue of perimeter security. For example, at the channel tunnel and some continental seaports there are screening units that will reveal at a glance whether there are illegal immigrants in lorries. I understand that that same technology could be used to take at least a first look at people coming through the doors of security terminals, to see whether they are carrying bombs or weapons. I wonder whether the option of selective scanning of vehicles passing through the gates of airports has been considered. Such pre-scanning, even on an intelligence-led basis, would have a price, but it would materially reduce the threat.
Much of the technology that I have outlined was developed in this country. Security has become an extremely successful British industry. Companies such as Qinetiq supply hardware and British firms supply software packages and train people to handle security apparatus. Crucially, as other hon. Members have mentioned, we lead the world in the profiling packages to identify behaviour that is indicative of a terrorist mindset. Of course, no solution is cost-free, but the cost of doing nothing will be much greater, and not only in lives. The airport operators are private companies and if they reap the rewards in the good times, they must pick up the bill in the bad. The Government can help the process along. I shall come in a moment to an area in which funds could be better used.
Failure is not only risky. It will also be economically extremely costly to us, and could hand a victory of a different kind to the terrorist. If the security arrangements at our airports are not seen to be both tight and capable of processing large numbers of people without long queues developing, people will go elsewhere. London is still the world’s premier financial centre. Let our airports fall behind and we may find that we lose that edge. American friends of mine have told me that they do not want to use Heathrow again after the experiences that they had in the summer.
Technology has another role to play, which goes beyond scanning apparatus. Scanning systems do not prevent conspiracy, and they do not prevent those who are unarmed at the point of departure from going to another country from where they can mount an attack. As the recent terrorist attacks have shown, those people are highly mobile. They criss-cross the world, meeting together. As the security services get better at phone tapping and internet monitoring, the importance to the terrorist of the face-to-face meeting grows. What is needed is to pick up potential problems as early as possible in the process. To pick up on a point that the hon. Gentleman made earlier, a number of countries in the Gulf and New Zealand have a real-time analysis of data at the point of ticket purchase. Alas, the British system, Semaphore, which covers only 12 per cent. of passengers, is based on flight manifests, ensuring that the problems are likely to be identified only after the
aeroplane has taken off. With that system we can only export the problem to another country, perhaps by turning the aircraft around, as the Americans do—they have a system like that in place at the moment—or hope to pick people up once they have arrived.
By using a system that is based on flight manifests, rather than one that is based on ticket purchases, we lose the opportunity to pick out associations. While an individual’s name might be on a list of suspects, the person with whom they are travelling might not be. A system that is based on checking flight manifests rather than starting with the original ticketing data, as is done in New Zealand, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and several other countries, will not pick up the fact that those two people are travelling together, so only one of them might be stopped. We are tackling problems at the final stage, instead of looking for trouble at the earliest possible stage of each process. After all the mess-ups in the NHS and other areas, I beg the Government not to carry on down the route that they are following with Semaphore and the working party that is very light on experience in this area. We do not need another costly Government-led development of a system that is not much use anyway. Instead, we should take the ticketing software that already exists, off the shelf, which has been so skilfully developed for use in other countries, and develop it into much better systems. We need to work from the beginning of the process.
What happens in our airports is only a small part of the battle against terrorism. Thanks to the initiative of the hon. Gentleman, we are rightly focusing on that small part today, but, ultimately, the development of intelligence and many other central areas for which the Government are responsible will be the decisive factors. As I said at the outset, when considering this important issue, which terrorists have chosen as a key battle ground, we must be clear about who is responsible for what. In a free country, we will never have control over where our citizens go, and neither should we wish to. If we try to restrict or curtail basic liberties or our way of life, we hand a different kind of victory to the terrorists by default—something we must never do. However, we are not powerless, and a great deal more can be done.
10.42 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Jim Fitzpatrick): It is a pleasure to have you in the Chair, Mr. Taylor. I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Donohoe) on securing the debate. As he said, he has a personal interest in this matter both as a frequent flier and as a special constable. I thank other hon. Members for contributing to this important and topical discussion.
Hardly a day goes by without some media reference to airport security. The spotlight seems to be permanently fixed on security at UK airports. That is good, in a sense, because it ensures that we remain highly sensitive to the threats and challenges that face us at this time. We need to be vigilant to the serious and sustained threat, and I join hon. Members in paying tribute both to those who protect us generally and specifically to those who have protected us in the past few weeks. Aviation remains a target for international terrorists—the incident at Glasgow is a prime example of that—but, in response to my hon. Friend’s
comments, I shall talk about the events of last summer and the heightened measures that were introduced thereafter, which are still evident today, before addressing more specific points.
The increase in the threat level to critical last summer meant that we needed to introduce additional security measures to protect both passengers and people working in the aviation industry from the threat from liquid explosives. The alternative would have been to cancel all flights, but the cost and disruption of doing so would have given the terrorists the success that they desire and would not have been acceptable to either the industry or the travelling public. Those measures supplemented an already robust security regime. The industry should be applauded for ensuring that flights continued and passengers should be thanked for their understanding and patience.
UK security measures draw much from our success in ensuring that the baseline European security regulations, which restricted the quantities of liquids taken through search points, were eventually amended. Those changes took effect in November. Today, passengers may take liquids through security search points provided that they are in containers not exceeding 100 ml and that they are presented in a re-sealable, transparent plastic bag. The International Civil Aviation Organisation has recommended that its members should adopt the solution of allowing passengers departing their airports to use 1 litre bags or 100 ml containers, and the procedure has been adopted in the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and Singapore, which shows that there is discussion about harmonising arrangements internationally. Other measures introduced here and across the EU have included the removal of coats and laptops for separate screening. We also started checking passengers’ footwear and limiting cabin luggage to one bag, providing that it did not exceed the maximum size, and still do so today. The latter system is due to be incorporated into EU regulations next year and has long been recommended by the International Air Transport Association on safety grounds.
As the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) pointed out, the UK faces a higher threat from terrorism than most other countries in either the EU or the rest of the world. The evidence is there to be seen: there were attacks or attempted attacks in July 2005, August 2006 and June 2007. That is why we have and need to have measures in place that are more stringent than those in other European member states.
Mr. Donohoe: Surely it is a nonsense that when one gets to the comb, at security, one can get by the two-bag rule by packing one bag into the other, and can then take it out again at the other end. That does not make an awful lot of sense, and is not applied elsewhere in Europe.
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