Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
Detective Chief Inspector Tony McCarthy
10 OCTOBER 2007
Q1Chairman: Detective Chief Inspector, thank
you very much for coming, and I would also like to thank you for
the very useful written evidence which we received from the Assistant
Chief Constable. Before we start, would you like to make any sort
of opening statement?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: No, not
at all. I am happy to start.
Q2 Chairman: Then I think I would like you
to give this Committee a brief overview, first of all, of your
own position in this subject, where you stand in it and perhaps
a brief summary of your past. I do not want a full curriculum
vitae, but really what I would be very interested in is a brief
overview of the current system of border controls in the UK and
port controls, focusing in particular on the role between the
various agencies involved, including of course the local police
authorities, so could I throw that rather general question at
you to start with.
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: I like general
questions actually.
Q3 Chairman: I should have explained that
a full record is being taken and you will be sent the transcript
of the meeting for your agreement or comment.
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: There are
three main border agencies operating at this point, the Border
and Immigration Agency, formerly known as the United Kingdom Immigration
Service, the police at borders, who are Special Branch officers
primarily with support from Protective Security and general policing
elements that are mainly uniformed officers, but also backed up
by civilian staff and CID officers, et cetera, from the host force,
and HMRC, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, are the third main
border agency and they mainly deal with revenue-collection and
customs-enforcement. On the police side of the business, our priorities
are divided up into three areas. The first is intelligence where
Special Branch officers operate mainly in a non-uniformed capacity
in order to gain intelligence on persons of interest as they pass
through the border, working very closely with other agencies,
such as the Security Service. The Special Branch officers are
also responsible for child abduction matters and serious organised
crime matters that are not being dealt with, in partnership with
the Serious Organised Crime Agency.
Q4 Chairman: That includes people-smuggling,
does it?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: It does,
yes. The lead on people-smuggling would be with SOCA, the Serious
Organised Crime Agency, and obviously on the trafficking side
that would be of interest to the United Kingdom Human Trafficking
Centre which is in Sheffield. The police are also responsible
at ports for protective security and that could be in two ways.
That could be your armed officers or unarmed officers and both
overt and covert in that respect as well. The third element of
the policing effort at ports and borders is general policing whereby
normal crime, which it would generally be tagged as, would be
dealt with by police officers in uniform and again with CID back-up
and civilian support staff as well. Currently, the three agencies
work separately. I am sure you are probably aware that there is
a Cabinet Office review currently under way to look at how the
agencies could work even closer towards forming a unified border
force.
Q5 Chairman: Is there Cabinet Office machinery
already in place?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: Yes, there
is. It is under Sir Gus O'Donnell. He leads the review for the
Prime Minister and a report is due back with findings, conclusions
and recommendations by the end of October this year. That review
team is looking at primarily the formation of a unified border
force which looks this time to be made up of Border and Immigration
Agency staff, HMRC front-line detection officers and will include
also the full integration of UK visas into the Border and Immigration
Agency. At the moment, it is still being discussed as to where
indeed Special Branch officers fit within that and the wider police
package, where that sits, and the general policing and protective
security elements. There is some discussion as to whether the
police role within any unified border force would be a border
security role or a border control role and we have really got
our own definitions for the two within the police which I can
give you now, if that is of any help. The police definition of
border control is the facilitation of the legal, and the prevention
of the illegal, movement of people or goods across the border,
and our definition of border security encompasses that definition
of border control and goes a bit further than that to include
the protection of the border and ports from terrorism, crime and
other threats to public safety. We see the police remit across
the board if you take into account the three elements, the intelligence-gathering,
the protective security and the general police element, as being
primarily protective security and border security, but also with
some element of border control, especially where SB are concerned.
The fiscal make-up of the border controls means that Special Branch
officers work immediately in the vicinity of immigration officers
and also very closely with revenue and customs officers at the
border, so geographically within the border in the arrivals and
departures lounges the police are working quite closely, but separately
in terms of their objectives with their partner agencies at the
border.
Q6 Chairman: Could you say a word about
your enforcement powers, speaking of the ports policing.
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: If we look
at the general policing and protective security side first, they
are general police powers and they are powers that are available
to all police officers within the UK. Within Special Branch, the
border control/border security element split, there is a specific
piece of legislation which is used by SB officers which is Schedule
7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which gives a power to officers to
examine persons of interest or potential interest in order to
confirm any involvement they might have in acts of terrorism or
to render that person not of interest to police or the security
services, but our chief role as SB officers at ports is to gather
intelligence, to feed into security services for our own use and
other agencies' use as is relevant.
Q7 Chairman: Have you personally actually
taken part in Frontex operations?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: No, there
is absolutely no UK police involvement in Frontex operations,
to my knowledge, at this point in time or previously.
Q8 Lord Marlesford: The post that you hold
is a co-ordinating post.
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: Yes.
Q9 Lord Marlesford: How long have you yourself
done it for or how long have people been doing it?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: I am not
actually the National Co-ordinator Ports Policing. An ACC, John
Donlon, is the actual Co-ordinator Ports Policing. As to how long
has he been in that role, I think he has been roughly there for
about two years now. It would be a role that is untenured, so
there is not a fixed term on it, as far as I am aware, but I can
confirm that for you after this meeting, and I am not sure when
John Donlon is due to leave his post.
Q10 Lord Marlesford: And you yourself?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: I am a Sussex
police officer. I am here for two years within the National Co-ordinator's
office. I have been here a year already, so I am due to leave
next July.
Q11 Lord Marlesford: The thing which comes
out of your very useful note you sent us is the reference to e-Borders,
and the obvious linkage between the police and e-Borders is the
police national computer. In the e-Borders system whereby there
is a checking of passports which, as most of us have experienced,
is underway in a lot of ports, does that have an on-line link
so that anyone who is on the PNC would show up?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: The current
system is HOWI, the Home Office warning index, and that is where
your passport is swiped when you enter or leave the country into
a WICU machine, a warning index machine, so if you hand your passport
over to an immigration officer, they will swipe the passport and
it will be fed into the database, be checked against that database
and it will come back. The HOWI/WICU database at this time, if
we wanted to make an entry on it for police concerns where somebody
had been flagged up for police interest or there might be a security
services interest, that would come up on the screen of the immigration
officer who would then follow a pattern in order to notify the
appropriate person or persons of that person coming to notice
or passing through the port either for immediate action or action
at a later time. As far as the PNC is concerned, that would be
dealt with as a separate check. If the person was referred to
the police, then it would be a standard check which would be undertaken.
As far as e-Borders is concerned, it would be a standard check
which would be undertaken once e-Borders is fully up and running.
Q12 Lord Marlesford: Do you have the capability
or practice indeed with the appropriate people from the PNC record
of noting where they are? Do you have the capability of putting
them on the, did you call it, a warning list?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: Yes, on
the warning index. We do have access to that and we do that via
the National Ports Office which is based at Heathrow.
Q13 Lord Marlesford: So that is happening
now?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: That happens
now, yes, but e-Borders is an extension of that where we get passenger
information in advance of the actual flight or voyage taking place,
in which case we can run information against several databases
which allows us to be aware of people in advance of them arriving
in the UK.
Q14 Baroness Henig: This is in clarification
of the question which you asked, Chairman, which was whether we
had been involved in any Frontex operations and the reply was
in the negative, but I gather we do have officers actually stationed
at Frontex.
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: They are
border and immigration officers.
Q15 Baroness Henig: So what do they do then?
What is their job?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: I think
you probably need to speak to the Border and Immigration Agency,
the border control representatives, to find out exactly what those
officers do.
Q16 Baroness Henig: But they are based in
Warsaw?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: To my knowledge,
there are two members that are permanently placed within Frontex
at Warsaw, the headquarters, but they are not there in a liaison
capacity, as far as I am aware, but more undertaking a specific
role as part of Frontex itself. Then there is one member of the
board of Frontex in representation of the Border and Immigration
Agency, but that is not as a voting member, but as an invitee.
Chairman: I think we will have an opportunity to
question them directly.
Q17 Baroness Tonge: I have a number of questions
I want to ask you, but, first of all, can I just comment that
I am awfully glad to hear that there is a review going on as to
how these agencies interact and you are clearly in the thick of
it.
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: Yes.
Q18 Baroness Tonge: So the first thing I
would like to ask you is: do you think there is a danger in having
these different organisations? My background is health and social
services and everyone is always buck-passing, "Oh, that's
not us, that's him", another day saved, another day wasted.
Does that go on? Secondly, I am not quite clear about the difference
between organised immigration crime, which seems to be dealt with
by SOCA, and smuggling and people-trafficking.
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: The review
is formed by, and directed from, the Prime Minister's speech on
25 July which said that there will be a visible presence at ports
for people arriving into the UK within the next several weeks.
A lot of that work focuses on the primary line work, that first
point of contact that the travelling public have with officialdom
when they land or arrive in a country. Previously, there have
been three lines of checks. The first is immigration officer checks,
the second is potentially police and Special Branch officers interdicting
members of the travelling public, and the third is an Her Majesty's
Revenue and Customs officer obviously looking for revenue and
illegal goods entering the country, so there is a three-tier approach
to managing the border controls. What is happening now is that
we are looking towards a single tier, a single primary line approach,
which has meant that BIA and HMRC in particular are working more
closely together and there is discussion as to whether the police,
the SB element of the police, should be working at this primary
line also. Our view within Special Branch and within the National
Co-ordinator's office is that the work of the police is so unique
here and so focused on counter-terrorism measures that it would
be dangerous to put this into a primary line because it might
mean diluting the skills of the officers having to deal with counter-terrorism
issues. As far as buck-passing is concerned, I think there is
potential for that if a single agency occurred where there was
not a single governance chain of command. If there was a coming
together potentially of the police, the Border and Immigration
Agency and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs at the border into
a single agency and they retained three separate governance chains
of command, then yes, of course there probably would be buck-passing
that would take place in the future, but, as it stands at the
moment, there are very clear distinctions and delineations between
each of the agencies' responsibilities.
Q19 Baroness Tonge: And the difference between
organised immigration crime and the smuggling and trafficking?
Detective Chief Inspector McCarthy: I have actually
got a definition taken from the Serious Organised Crime Agency
site that says exactly what organised immigration crime is. Serious
organised immigration crime really looks at both parts of what
you have described. It looks at smuggling and it looks at trafficking.
Smuggling is the facilitation of people into the country who are
coming in mainly to take economic benefit out of the country.
Trafficking is the exploitation of people being brought into the
country either to work as prostitutes or as some other form of
exploitation. The two are regarded as being under the same label,
so it is a split definition of that serious organised immigration
crime.
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