Mr Liam Byrne MP, Mr Brodie Clark, Mr Tom Dowdall and Mr Tom Dodd

12 DECEMBER 2007

  Q460  Lord Marlesford: 30 million what?

  Mr Clark: 30 million annualised movements into and out of the UK which then go through this data collection and analysis process of Semaphore which will be part of the full e-borders programme. We have reached 30 million and we have targets over the next two or three years as you have identified. It is a multi-agency operation so we have immigration staff sitting with Customs staff, sitting with Special Branch and UK Visas. It really is a joint agency piece of work which we are all very interested in. The key beneficiaries to date, I would suggest, have been the police. They have followed up over the 18 months of operation of Semaphore with 1,400 arrests, some ranging from quite serious offenders and they have been seeking to lower offenders. These in some degree have been people wanting to leave the country who have been picked up through the data around Semaphore. As the Minister said earlier, part of the issue is around data and how we analyse and act on it. Part is also around identity and making sure we have the right people. Over the past 12 months we have also been doing work on physical embarkation controls in one or two selected sites in line with risk and threat, so in line with the kind of nature of the routes that we are considering. At the moment, about 15% of people leaving Heathrow will go through a physical embarkation control which will not just manage the data but will do the physical check against the document and check for forgeries at that point. Similarly we have some work going at Gatwick on embarkation controls and we will do everything we can in the years ahead to develop and improve the targeting of that and the amount of that which takes place.

  Q461  Baroness Tonge: Can I just clarify something? We are hoping and attempting to count people in and out of our country. Are those people who go out then going back to their country of origin or may they go into another European country? The second part of my question is: how do European countries with the Schengen agreement in place count people in and out? Presumably, they cannot count people in and out of individual countries; it is just in and out of Europe. Because we are so different from the rest of Europe, how can we ever hope to be recognised as a proper player in the Frontex system and a proper part of it?

  Mr Byrne: That is a good question. I think that European border security is catching up. If you look at many of the ambitions of Member States to introduce for example biometric visas, Europe is maybe two years behind where we are but they are definitely heading in that direction. A number of Member States are exploring how to procure and put in place passenger screening systems. I think the French are amongst those Member States, again two or three years behind where the UK is. One of the questions that the European Commission is looking at in its review of Frontex is whether Customs operations should fall within the ambit of Frontex. Again, that is something that we are already addressing with this report which I have in hard copy. Although Britain may be leading the pack in some of the arrangements that we are making, there is a convergence in what is understood to be good practice and maybe in years to come you will see a greater similarity in border control systems. If you look at what is going on in Australia and America, you can see parallels to that integrated border security architecture which I sketched out. It is obviously different. Australia is different to America. America is very airline focused and it is very east coast focused as well. The land borders in the US are much more open. We have had to think much more systematically about air, land and sea. We have perhaps had to move faster in creating a much more holistic architecture for our border security. The truth is that most western states are heading towards the same kind of model.

  Q462  Baroness Tonge: Where do the people who go out of Britain go to? Do they go back to their country of origin? Do we know where they go or do we just dump them on Europe?

  Mr Byrne: No. I would not say we dump them on Europe. People are free to move wherever they choose to after they leave the UK. As the Immigration Minister, I see my day job as being concerned with people leaving the country when they have no right to be here so I am more relaxed about where they are going in some ways as long as they are obeying the rules Parliament is putting through. As long as they are operating according to the rules of Parliament, that is my job done.

  Q463  Baroness Tonge: What about humanitarian considerations?

  Mr Byrne: Obviously, where we have humanitarian considerations, we have the law and I think the law is well administered by the immigration appeals tribunal system. I think they do an extraordinary job and I know that under Igor Judge there are plans for further reform. It is often an extremely difficult and demanding job which I think our penal system does enormously well.

  Q464  Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: Perhaps I may underline the importance of Lord Marlesford's comments about the gap. My home is in the rural west Midlands on the Herefordshire/Shropshire border and the temporary immigration for fruit picking—raspberries, strawberries, soft fruits—means that mini-towns are established. It is not for me to tell you about political matters but in the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck staying on and not going back to where you came from is a big issue in that part of the world. I think closing the gap that Lord Marlesford referred to is very important. I just give that as an anecdotal, local bit of evidence. I would like to ask you something about the rather narrow issue of rescue at sea because that leads on to disembarkation and the whole issue as far as that is concerned. We have been told that there is a working party looking at EU guidelines on rescue at sea and we are part of that. I wonder if you could tell us where we are on that, of the progress there has been and the likely timetable to be followed and indeed whether or not this should be done at an EU level or at a Frontex level. We have also heard from the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association that it is not clear whether international rescue obligations apply to Frontex or only to countries, whether or not that should be so extended or whether it should remain at a national level, or indeed whether your view is that it is in any case.

  Mr Byrne: I share your view about what is going on in the west Midlands. I recently had a meeting with the National Farmers' Union just outside Hereford and they are demanding more migrants from east Europe. It is a difficult balance to strike sometimes.

  Q465  Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: It is whether they go at the end.

  Mr Byrne: We do think it would be helpful to clarify the rules. On the point about Frontex though, we are not sure that there are necessarily changes to the regulations for Frontex which are needed. It goes back to my point about planning that I made earlier on. We do think that Frontex as part of its operational planning needs to be pretty sharp about precisely what legal basis and what laws are going to be used and what obligation is incumbent on who that is going to be germane before they start the operation. We think that the obligation should remain very much with Member States but when we are going into operational planning which Member States and which obligations need to be thought through at the outset, not ex post facto. There are two working groups that have been set up. The first one is to discuss the commissioned study into international law as it relates to illegal migration by sea. That discussion has led to a group being set up to discuss the draft guidelines that would apply to Frontex operations. We support it. It has met three times. The guidelines have not been agreed yet but we hope to see the guidelines in the new year. Separately, the meeting that Mr Faull talked about which met in June 2007 agreed that there should be a working group established to develop non-binding guidelines about the law of the sea as it relates to EU States and illegal migrants more generally, but as yet no working group has been set up on that. There is one group which is up and running, which has met three times, looking at the regulations with regard to Frontex operations. There is then a decision to establish a group looking at this question more widely. That has not yet been set up. Do we have a timetable for when that group is going to be set up?

  Mr Dodd: We do not have one at the moment. We do believe there is a lack of clarity in the law of the sea and we are quite keen to work with other Member States to clarify that law as soon as we can. [1]

  Q466  Lord Teverson: One of the areas we have been particularly looking at is around the coordination of the work of the Border and Immigration Agency with the other agencies which you will be well aware of: SOCA, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and the security and intelligence services. We would like to understand more about the coordination and how those activities, information and intelligence are shared with Frontex. As we have a passport union and travel freely over the Republic of Ireland as well, let alone the Crown dependencies and I think also Gibraltar, we have a gaping hole in terms of a particular UK e- borders process. I would like to understand also particularly the Republic of Ireland aspect of this coordination and how that is also controlled and how it works.

  Mr Byrne: I will ask Tom to talk a little bit about the common travel area in a moment because I know it is an issue that has come up in the House of Lords once or twice now. I think Lord Trimble has raised it once or twice with Lord West. It was an issue that we flagged for review in the document published in March but I will ask Tom to explain a bit about where that has gone. Basically, the coordination of our operations operates at three levels, at the political, at the strategic and the tactical. At the political level, the committee that I worked to is called the DAM, the Domestic Affairs Committee on Migration and that provides government with overall political and strategic direction on border control and immigration policy. That has met about three times already this last session. At the strategic level, the UK Border Agency will obviously now fold together UK Visas, the work of Customs and the work of BIA. That will create a dual reporting line for me. I will report both to the Home Secretary and to the Chancellor on that. The board that is set out in the document that we talked about a moment ago will have both a Customs Commissioner and a senior police officer to provide that strategic coordination. At the tactical level, there is then a number of different ways in which police, Customs and immigration staff work together. The Joint Border Operating Centre that Brodie talked about a second ago is very important. I do not know if the Committee has had a chance to go to the JBOC at Heathrow. It is well worth a visit because there you can see Customs, Special Branch, immigration officers and police working very closely together in an enormously effective way. A second example would be the Joint Passenger Analysis Unit that is established at Heathrow where again that allows BIA officials and HMRC officials to analyse intelligence and jointly target individuals. There is a similar operation in Kent that brings together Kent Police and others. There are a number of tactical relationships. When we look at SOCA, there is a joint programme of work that is agreed between BIA and SOCA. The Committee probably knows this. There are about 19 different programmes of work that SOCA are running. BIA is represented in about six of them. This is a changing picture because of the advent of the UK Border Agency but in summary that is how it works at the political, strategic and tactical level. Did you have a question about sharing with Frontex?

  Q467  Lord Teverson: Yes. It is how that coordination relates to Frontex.

  Mr Dodd: On the CTA, at the moment we are reviewing the CTA. It is perhaps worth recalling why Ireland and the UK are outside Schengen. It is because we are both islands and we have the benefit of a maritime border. 21 miles of sea is the most effective border control you can have. Successive governments have decided that they want to retain that as our border with contact to Europe. In terms of the CTA, we are very keen to retain the CTA and the benefits of the CTA for CTA nationals. We already have very close operational co-operation with our Irish counterparts. We run joint operations eight days a month at various CTA ports with them and we detect a lot of immigration crime that way which works very well. In terms of the review, we are looking at ways in which we can strengthen the CTA, both externally and round the CTA but also internally at the border between Ireland and the UK. E-borders will apply in due course to sea and air routes between Ireland and the UK so that will be one way in which we will strengthen our control and analysis of passengers using those routes.

  Mr Byrne: On Frontex, effectively there are two ways in which we share intelligence with Frontex. The first is a two monthly strategic intelligence sharing report. There is then a quarterly meeting which brings together the intelligence and risk analysis network, FRAN, which is set up to try and discuss what is emerging from that intelligence.

  Mr Dowdall: Those are the main channels of exchange and there are areas we know where there is room for improvement with Frontex. That is very much linked to the build-up of their risk analysis unit and improvement in their analytical capability. In addition to that, there is also the tactical exchange where we are involved in operations such as those mentioned earlier on. There is also a direct feed from a UK central point of contact with Frontex.

  Q468  Lord Dear: In my previous life, I worked very closely with all of those agencies, SOCA, the security services and so on. I know the problems of all those agencies. They collect data and they guard it very closely. Knowledge is important; knowledge is status; knowledge is power. They never really want to share very much, no matter how much they say they are doing that. I wonder whether you could address that particular issue, as to whether you are satisfied that there is a machinery for data sharing and using it.

  Mr Byrne: I will give you a political answer and then I will ask Brodie to give an operational answer. My own sense is that there are tactical initiatives like the Joint Border Operation Centre which have really taken us on quite a long way. When I first visited the Joint Border Operation Centre at Heathrow, I think it was during the World Cup. What the team there were able to show me is how football hooligans that were on travel ban orders were being picked up on passenger manifests. Special Branch was then able to pick up that information and to ask people to intercept those individuals at the border and stop them leaving the country in order to go and potentially cause trouble at the World Cup. There are eight examples like that where information sharing is very good. The work that we are doing with SOCA is in its early stages and that is important because, as you know, what we are trying to do to combat illegal immigration is move further and further upstream, particularly into those transit hubs where SOCA will have assets that nobody else does. There are then particular points of vulnerability on the border where there are extra tactical arrangements that are needed. In preparation for Member States coming into the Schengen zone, I have asked that our activity in the Pas de Calais and in Kent is stepped up. I am especially interested in how our work with Kent Police can be upgraded and how we can extend into for example the management of covert human intelligence sources because, when I visited Calais—I have been to Calais a few times now—what they will often say is that nobody gets on a truck to Britain without the say-so of either the Afghan gang or the Iranian gang and we have lots of anecdotal experience of would-be illegal migrants being quite badly hurt by those elements of organised crime where they have not paid their dues. The estimates have been given that something like three quarters of illegal immigration into Britain is in the hands of organised crime. I do not know whether that is true or not. You would probably know better than me. There are a number of areas like that where I suspect that the tactical development of joint operation needs to be stronger. That is why I am a passionate advocate of the UK Border Agency because I just think the more we can bring those relationships tighter together the better. I characterise it as operating at three levels. Obviously there is the border experience, the bit that faces out to the public. There is the bit at the top. There is the combined organisation, but there is all the stuff in the middle, that work of intelligence sharing and so on. I do not have the evidence to prove it but in my heart I feel that it is there.

  Mr Clark: Firstly, each of the agencies you were referring to have their own intelligence and tasking arrangements in play. Increasingly, we are doing the mix and match so SOCA are part of the BIA tasking and intelligence process and increasingly that swap over is proving very beneficial, not only in understanding what is going on and the priorities of other agencies but also in working with those other agencies. As a consequence of that, particularly with SOCA, we have done some very important work with one particular country. Secondly, the JBOC has been mentioned already. Thirdly, the border management programme which was the precursor to the unified border force document took us a long way down the process of sharing processes and information between the key agencies at the border. Indeed, one of the work streams in the border management programme was about risk assessment and an intelligence-based model for carrying risk assessment out between the agencies, so one shared system to operate at the front line. The other thing that is happening is that agencies are recognising the benefits of sharing as well as wanting historically to protect information. I think some of the work that has come out of our JBOC and the arrests the police have had from that is a real recognition that we cannot do this on our own. No one agency can succeed in this but if we do pull together and begin to trust each other an awful lot more then we will get significant gains. I think there is a climate of that around now. It has been helped by some of the IT developments because that is the point at which often agencies required to make choices about whether to plug in or stay removed. The arguments and the reasoning very clearly for a plug-in because of the benefits you get from it. There is a kind of catalyst around with some of the IT developments that different agencies have taken forward.

  Mr Byrne: Another example of that is, when we roll out the full e-border system, the way the roll-out programme will be prioritised will obviously be heavily influenced not just by our own needs but also police and counter terrorism needs as well. Those agencies are at the table. One of the announcements that the Prime Minister made in his security statement a bit earlier on was for example about the inclusion of OPI data in the data that we collect. That is particularly important for the security services rather than for our own needs but it is an example of people beginning to understand the benefits of some of that data sharing.

  Q469  Lord Dear: You have arrived at the point I wanted to hear about which is data sharing. I guess from what you said that you are going to have some sort of data sharing IT system, not one that will allow you to go into all the back rooms of these organisations but at least to get a flag which will show that there is an interest.

  Mr Byrne: Exactly. We will lay regulations in the new year, which will need to be debated in both Houses, which will equip us with the authority to undertake that data sharing. In the current climate it will not be controversy free but it is really important.

  Q470  Lord Dear: At least you go back into the data.

  Mr Byrne: Absolutely.

  Q471  Lord Mawson: This work is all very new to me because I am quite new to this Committee but the world of inner cities and agencies working together is not new to me at all. One has listened in the inner cities to lots of talk about joined up thinking and joined up action and yet, when you go and look at the devil in the detail, you see the human relationships between the health service, local authorities and other key agencies are not happening in some of the poorest estates in Britain. I know how difficult this stuff is. When you dig further you find that not enough effort has been put into building the human relationships between the various bodies. My experience is that structures are one thing; people are another. Just to push you a bit further, I wonder what is being done. If one does not build the human relationships and learn how to do these complex partnerships—and there is quite a skill to this—at a rhetorical level things may be said to be done and names may change on doors but in reality certain things are not happening. I particularly pick up the concern on recently hearing that some of the key services in Europe and NATO are not communicating very well. I think, my goodness, if a member of the public knew that, they would be very concerned. How do we ensure that these basic human relationships are happening because all else follows it seems to me? What are we doing about that?

  Mr Byrne: Absolutely right. These are human systems and their delicate ecology is like any other human system. Maybe Brodie can add something about the way in which parts of our businesses like intelligence and risk assessment come together. I will say two things. I think we have had to work quite hard in the last 12 months to make sure there are not requirements that are imposed at the top that point people in different directions. The thing that ACPO, people like Ken Jones and Graham Maxwell, who is the immigration leader for ACPO, have been saying to me for some time is that the immigration service's, in their eyes exclusive, focus on failed asylum seekers is not conducive to much more effective joint working at the front line. When we published the enforcement strategy in March 2007 for the Border and Immigration Agency, we changed the framework. We said that we were going to prioritise tackling harm to Britain. All of a sudden, that opens the possibility for a different kind of relationship and often priorities which are stitched together locally. If you take the Met for example, the problem of crime caused by illegal immigrants in Marylebone would be quite different to what it looks like in Waltham Forest. We need to give people the freedom, if you like, to begin assembling what makes most sense locally. We need to provide a framework but if we are providing a framework that allows people to work in common that is quite important progress. When we come to the development of the UK Border Agency, this is another example of how we have to get the human side of the business right. We are very fortunate in that the attitudes and aspirations of staff working at the border, whether they are in Special Branch or Customs or the Immigration Agency, are pretty similar. They are passionate about keeping Britain safe and they are very like minded. That is an enormous advantage. What I have asked for though, as we go into this merger, is we need to think about what is going on port by port. That is what is important to me. It is how these new arrangements are going to be put in place locally. I do not want any enormous, new, bureaucratic frameworks that talk about how I am going to talk to Jane Kennedy and how we are going to report to the Chancellor and the Home Secretary. That is important in terms of our accountability to Parliament but it is the port by port stuff that I am interested in because that is the front line. That is the bit of the system that really has to work if we are to fulfil our obligations to keep the country safe.

  Mr Clark: It is people change but it is cultural change. For us, part of the huge learning around this is looking at what other countries have done and what they have not done. We have been over to the US. We have had close discussions with the Canadians. They have made that kind of merge themselves with Customs and immigration together into one. We have seen what they are like three years down the road. We have seen how people are doing a different job but the cultural bloodstream is still as it was in many respects. I think we do well to learn a lot from the lessons of others. That is very important to us as we move into this. The other important thing in terms of this big change is that we are not approaching this in any way like it is the Border and Immigration Agency which is adding something into it. Rather, we are talking about a new agency, a new organisation with a new way of working and a new workforce to deliver that. It is not a sense of unequal partners in this; it is a new development, a new shape and a new organisation. For us, the other important thing is that there is a real belief through the respective businesses that the change we are going into is right. It makes huge sense so we are not having to pull people against the current. We are taking people in a direction that they firmly believe is the right way to go and will make a significant difference to the business at the border. I think that works to our advantage but we must not abuse it of course.

  Q472  Lord Marlesford: You are talking about learning from other countries. May I suggest you look at Hong Kong because their system, before the British left in 1997, was terrific. I go there quite often and I think it is a very good system. They had full e-border control in 1997 and I do suggest you talk to the person who had been in charge up until then and go and see them again.

  Mr Dowdall: I will just try to describe the reality of what happens in an area of strategic importance such as Kent where we have our juxtaposed controls on the other side of the Channel and the importance of the relationships between Customs and the police and the Border and Immigration Agency. I have had to forge strong, personal relationships with my counterparts in the police and Customs. It is important to share the agendas because, particularly for the police, they have a real interest in immigration related issues. It affects their resources and coming to deal with lorry drops or any crime related matters within the Kent area. Therefore, we have our officers who are based in a joint freight intelligence office. We make joint selections of high risk lorries and consignments. We also are involved in jointly searching and also share our relative tasking. We have operations coming up in the next couple of weeks that involve a number of agencies, not only the Border Agency but also VOSA and one or two others. It really has to be based upon the development of those personal relationships and the development of trust, not only personal trust but also trust that the organisations will do something on behalf of another.

  Mr Byrne: The creation of that shared advantage is the key to it. When you talk to front-line border security staff at Dulles Airport for example, they will say that even five years on they feel still very committed to the business that they came from. Two things have been key to front-line motivation going into the changes. One has been that people see that they can do their job better by working with others. The second thing though that was quite interesting was that people also see a whole host of different career paths and specialisms opening up in front of them, so they can see personal advantages and a more interesting career and different opportunities to serve opening up. If you go and talk to our staff in Coquelles where we have been doing some experiments on how we bring Customs and immigration staff together and you talked to quite young immigration officers who are now working together with Customs on some of the deep search capabilities that Customs have, they are really interested in acquiring and the opportunity to acquire different kinds of specialisms. The richness of their career has just multiplied. That is what the Americans found and that is one of the things that we want to be able to bring to the UK.

  Q473  Lord Mawson: These things do not happen by magic. I just wonder what investment is being made in those processes. Do we know?

  Mr Byrne: We have not finalised that yet. I am trying to finalise that for the Chancellor and the Home Secretary over the next month or so.

  Q474  Lord Teverson: I have one factual question on the common travel area. It is whether the Republic of Ireland is or is going to be doing exit monitoring itself.

  Mr Dodd: They are developing the e-border system which they will have in place a few years after us so they will then have an exit system themselves.

  Q475  Lord Teverson: The next question the Minister has answered to a degree in that you were quite fulsome in your praise for the way that the rest of Europe was catching up. Given that convergence, should that not mean that we should take the full benefit of our European Union subscription and membership and become full members of Schengen altogether, given your excellent prognosis for the future?

  Mr Byrne: Possibly but not yet. Speaking candidly, until we have greater confidence than we have today in the strength of the external border, I do not think that would be something that I could recommend yet. The World Bank in Global Economic Prospects, which was published last year, forecast that something like a billion people will join the labour market in the developing world between now and 2025. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there is a five fold difference in household income between low income and high income countries. My warning is that over the next 20 years the pressure on Europe's borders will not diminish. It will grow and it will grow sharply. We are already seeing that pressure across the Mediterranean. There is a new risk which Europe is running at the moment with the admission of east European states into the Schengen area. A lot of money is being spent on managing that risk but it is a risk nonetheless. I think it is realistically going to be three to five years before we are really able to take stock of how secure Europe's external frontiers are. The changes in the world and in global migration are that complicated at the moment that that is a realistic time frame for being able to come up with a realistic assessment. That is my own personal view.

  Q476  Lord Dear: I was interested particularly in looking at the formation of the new agency that we have all talked about and how that will fit into Frontex. Presumably it will not be easy; there will have to be adjustments both ways and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that nip and tuck, so to speak, and in particular on the question of whether we do arm our own border guards or not and, if not, why not?

  Mr Byrne: We do not arm border guards and we are not planning to do so. Border guards, as you know, are equipped with retractable batons and handcuffs at the moment. The report published by Sir Gus O'Donnell tried to draw a separation between protective security functions and border security functions at our ports. We obviously embed a lot of police officers within the Border and Immigration Agency already and we benefit enormously from the capability that police officers bring us but our sense is that at ports and airports today, because there is an armed police presence largely deployed on protective security arrangements, the capability that is needed for armed response is already there. We are satisfied with those arrangements. In terms of the evolution of the UK Border Agency and its relationship with the police, this is obviously a difficult question as you know. I think there was a sense that there needed to be more consensus than there was to date about how police forces themselves coordinated their work at the border. There were obviously in the Met and in Kent questions about abstraction of forces which was going to impact on the flexibility and deployment of resources in those forces, so there were a number of questions there but that is why "Securing the Global Hub" was so explicit about the need for the Home Secretary to take forward those discussions. When it comes to Frontex, I think we will have to see what the ECJ rules and we expect that on 18 December. Again, I come back to the point I made at the beginning about our ambition to see Frontex evolve in a very pragmatic way. There have been a number of operations, one in particular which was quite effective in reducing the number of illegal migrants routing up through the Canaries. It showed that Frontex is capable of displacing activity. We want to see more of that kind of operation evaluated effectively so that we can understand the displacement effects. That is where we want to participate with Frontex over the next three to five years. We really do want to see Frontex walk before it can run but that is partly why we are going to be quite interested in your report on where you think Frontex should be going, because obviously we will need to put your report alongside what the European Commission says.

  Q477  Lord Dear: It would help us to know what you think might be the difficult points, the obstacles, in advance. Have you a list of things you have to address?

  Mr Byrne: My perspective is that we need to see more effective planning arrangements and more effective evaluation requests. If you take for example the fact that the budget for Frontex is going to double by about 35 million euros, that is a big increase in an organisation's resources in any one year and it is good that the European Parliament has asked for a pretty detailed business plan before it signs that money off. We really need to understand how practically Frontex is going to make a difference because, as you know, tackling illegal migration is not just about those front of field operations that Frontex is able to get involved in. It is also about Member States' effective policing of their borders. It is about a more concerted attack on organised, illegal immigration crime where agencies like Europol are going to be important. There is the work of codevelopment in countries as well as our combined work to shut down the pull factors for illegal immigration in country too, which the French presidency I hope will pick up. I just want to see the specifics around the practical operations first.

  Mr Clark: For me, there are issues around the relevance of the operations. They have to be relevant to us, or else there is no point, is there? They have to be effective and they have to deliver something. That is very important to us and there has to be a sustainability about the collaboration in itself. It has to feel solid and as though it is going to endure to a degree. The other thing of interest—maybe concern—is the ambitions of Frontex itself and the way that it manages those ambitions so that it is not trying to do everything all the time. It is the Minister's point about walking before running. The ambition may be very high to do lots of other things and I think for us there is a very big note of caution around that.

  Mr Dowdall: I have a couple of points. One is the evaluation of Frontex by the Commission, which will consider whether it needs to expand its remit in any way. It already focuses on immigration matters. It has also focused on things such as car crime for example. There have been a number of operations over the last year which we have been involved in and we would expect an increase in operations next year. We would certainly urge that there is a focus on the quality of those operations rather than just simply undertaking double or treble operations.

  Q478  Chairman: You talked about the budget increase. Can I take it from your answer that the government is content with the very large increase in Frontex's budget?

  Mr Byrne: We are content but we will be looking hard at what it is going to be spent on.

  Q479  Lord Young of Norwood Green: What do you see as the added value of the Rapid Border Intervention Teams Regulation? What provisions have been made or are intended to be made to allow UK immigration officers to participate in these operations and pilot projects and in what capacity?

  Mr Byrne: The added value of RABITs is obviously that they give Frontex that added flexibility to respond to urgent or emergency situations. That is particularly a concern for the southern EU states. I have had a number of discussions with the politicians in Malta for example and they really feel that urgency perhaps more sharply than any of us. The second point is that we will have to wait to see what the ECJ comes back with before we can really think through how we can play. Even if that ECJ judgment is negative, we would like to continue playing a role in an observation and advisory capacity just because we think we are pretty good at this stuff.