Chris Hobbs is a retired Metropolitan Police Special Branch officer who spent one third of his career working at border controls in both the UK and Jamaica. In the wake of the Prime Minister's statement on the threat posed by returning jihadists, he articulates the concerns of counter terrorist police and UK Border Force officers who are on the front line at UK air and sea ports.

 

The UK’s counter terrorist officers and their Border Force colleagues were hoping against hope over the weekend that Prime Minister David Cameron’s House of Commons statement in respect of UK Jihadists would herald a new era in the effectiveness of UK Border Controls which would ensure the demise of their ‘chocolate teapot’ reputation.

They were perhaps not unduly surprised to find their hopes dashed with the familiar implication contained within the statement that the government would be expecting, to use that oft familiar term; ‘more for less.’

In tandem with the dashed hopes, there was the inevitable but cynical reaction that the government are attempting to ‘shut the stable doors after most of the horses have bolted’ without providing the necessary additional resources which would ensure that those stable doors remained shut.

Leaving aside the effectiveness of government proposals, the consistent view amongst all with a knowledge of borders is that action to strengthen the UK’s vulnerable border controls and disrupt jihadists travelling not just to Syria and Iraq but to other war zones such as Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen, should have been a priority years ago. It may of course be that in the future we could have similar problems with followers of the Nigerian jihadist terror group Boko Harem who have just declared a caliphate in Northern Nigeria.

The headline catching proposal to seize passports of British jihadists as they attempt to leave the country is causing much head scratching amongst those who will do the seizing. They are asking, not unreasonably, how passports can be readily seized from individuals leaving the UK at border controls that don’t actually exist?

The small number of counter terrorist officers who are deputed to monitor departing passengers have to operate in less than satisfactory conditions at the gates of target flights or amidst the chaos of the central search area. The situation is complicated still further by the fact that jihadists will now travel via at least one or possibly two separate European or indeed other hub,s purchasing their tickets in separate segments to avoid detection. The fact remains that 99% of passengers leaving the UK will not pass under the eyes of any UK law enforcement officer.

Nick Clegg added to the confusion and suspicion that yesterday’s statement was largely meaningless window dressing by indicating on 5 Live Breakfast that such passport seizures would be ‘intelligence led.’ Given that counter terrorist police at ports would attempt, in any event, to intercept individuals where there was intelligence to suggest that they would be travelling abroad to engage in nefarious activities and given that hundreds, indeed over the years, thousands have travelled abroad undetected to engage in violent jihad, the Nick Clegg interpretation hardly inspires confidence.

The only viable solution is the re-establishment of fully functioning embarkation (departure/exit) controls complete with relevant IT systems as soon as possible. Home Office spin referring to the intention of re-establishing exit controls in 2015 will not satisfy the demands of front line border staff. This move is designed only as a counting mechanism in terms of monitoring the departure of foreign visitors and UK Border Agency officers, as opposed to Border Force, will expressly NOT be required to detect potential jihadists, paedophiles, child abductors, potential victims of forced marriages or FGM, drug couriers, drugs and people traffickers or criminals ‘jumping bail,’

The move is designed to compensate for the current inability of the eBorders system to achieve one of its major objectives which is to ‘count’ foreign visitors in and out of the UK and provide details of ‘overstayers.’ As soon as the system achieves its objectives, then these so called ‘exit’ controls will be consigned to history in the same way Jack Straw consigned ‘embarks’ controls to oblivion in 1998 despite the protests from police, security services, family court judges and solicitors, customs, immigration and women’s groups.

Since the arrival of the current government, counter terrorist officers at airports have at best, seen their numbers remain static and more frequently seen their numbers decline because of cutbacks; this despite a hugely increased workload due to events in Somalia, Kenya, Iraq and Syria which is in addition to the now almost historical travel of Islamist zealots to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the absence of properly resourced ‘embarks’ controls or of additional counter terrorist officers being posted to air and seaports, any increased monitoring of departing passengers will only weaken still further the fragile security which currently exists in the passenger arrivals halls.

The situation at passport controls in ‘arrivals’ remains shambolic. Despite Home Office retorts of ‘absolute rubbish’ UK Border Force officers are still being refused permission by supervisors to examine non EU foreign nationals with whom they have concerns, if there is a build up queues. This is a huge weakness in terms of non-British returning jihadists who are resident in the UK. The situation is further exacerbated due to high levels of UKBF sickness.

UK Border Force officers operating at the UK/EU controls are currently forbidden to converse with arriving passengers unless they suspect them to be in possession of a forged passport. This means that jihadists have a free run through those controls unless they are unlucky enough to encounter a counter terrorist officer. The prospect of this recedes still further if those officers have, in future, to spend much of their time scrutinising departing flights in the absence of proper controls.

David Cameron’s reference in relation to airlines being compelled to submit passenger data is another example of meaningless ‘tough talking.’ Only a handful of foreign airlines refuse to submit API (Advanced Passenger Data) to the UK’s National Border Targeting Centre and it is this data that is the bedrock of the troubled eBorders system. API or passenger manifests to give them their popular title, are automatically run against the Police National Computer and a variety of watch lists.

Details of persons wanted by police or who are on a watch list normally appear within seconds enabling police action to be taken whether the flight is departing from the UK or an airport abroad. Whilst the half a dozen dissenting airline carriers need to be brought into line this is hardly a major security breach given the other issues which need addressing.

Passengers travelling by sea are also monitored and whilst the system is still subject to glitches and human error it is nevertheless a major step forward. The fact that eBorders is still not working to its full potential is regarded by police and border force officers involved in the project as the fault of the Home Office who sacked the contractors Raytheon back in 2010.

It was a project that would always be subjected to technical problems yet to those of us who benefited from it, the scheme represented a huge step forward in securing our borders. The fact that this decision cost the taxpayer nearly a quarter of a billion pounds in compensation awarded to Raytheon by a tribunal perhaps sums up the snakes and ladders nature of border control strategy. Good ‘up the ladder’ decisions are invariably offset by ‘sliding down the snake’ disasters.

Whilst eBorders has benefitted border controls, UK Border Force information technology issues are at the forefront of complaints by officers. The computer passengers see on the desks of officers at passport control is linked to the Home Office Warning Index yet that computer provides only the barest details of a possible ‘hit.’

Officers have then to abandon the passenger, retreat to the back office and log on to another computer to find out the necessary information or intelligence. This ‘Home Office Warning Index’ was severely criticised by the National Audit Office as containing out of date information. This was perhaps being kind in that the officers who have to use it are far more critical.

Contrast this with Homeland Security in the United States where all the relevant information required by the officer to make his or her decision, is accessible via the computer on that officer’s passport control.

Hopes that the Prime Minister would actually, within his statement, pledge that UK Border Force officers would get the tools to carry out their role effectively proved to be wishful thinking.

The proposal to prevent returning British jihadists from entering the UK for at least a specified period is also causing much puzzlement aside from the obvious legal issues. First and foremost they would have to be identified and relatively few are known. If they were identified at a Turkish or other foreign airport and it was made it clear that they were ‘banned’ from entering the UK, what would the reluctant ‘host’ country do with them?

How comfortable would they be with potential terrorists wondering their streets or even placing them in detention without trial? Perhaps they would be sent back to the warzone from whence they came, possibly to return to barbaric activities such as beheading or mass executions. It frankly is a proposal that merely seeks to grab the headlines and has little hope of fruition.

It would appear that UK law enforcement agencies are in fact belatedly examining historic passenger manifests against records held by the Turks in an attempt to identify Brits who have not returned within their visa period.

This close retrospective and ongoing scrutiny of ‘high risk’ flights using eBorders technology was suggested four years ago but rejected by a senior counter terrorist officer at Scotland Yard. That attention is only now being paid to historic data in relation to UK nationals entering and leaving Turkey is perhaps an indictment of the otherwise commendable efforts of the British security services. A strong argument could also have been made for deploying UK counter terrorist officers to Turkish airports to work with Turkish law enforcement authorities, who have, in any event, been closely cooperating with their British counterparts.

A precedent was set with British customs and police officers (including myself) being deployed to Jamaica to work alongside Jamaican police, customs and immigration officers at both Kingston and Montego Bay airports. Operation Airbridge has been widely praised and continues to this day yet, as important as the disruption of drug trafficking is, the stakes in respect of returning jihadists are much higher.

Considerable efforts in the past few years has gone into preventing English football hooligans from travelling abroad yet surely future enquiries after those first major jihadist atrocities in the UK will only conclude that the government sat on its hands for years whilst hundreds of terrorists were able to enter and leave the UK with impunity.

In the meantime perhaps the government should pay some attention to both the police and the UK Border Force who are clearly in the forefront of the efforts to prevent catastrophic terrorist incidents on the streets of the UK. Staff surveys and polls clearly show that morale of officers in both organisations is at rock bottom which is hardly a desirable state of affairs given the threat facing the UK.