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Daily Mail
April 24, 2014
Border guards have been banned from asking EU nationals how long they intend to stay in the UK or even what they plan to do here.
The Brussels move, confirmed by the Home Office, prompted incredulity among MPs, who called for Britain to regain control of its borders.
EU officials claim asking new arrivals even basic questions would breach free movement rules. The diktat’s existence, revealed last night in a report by MPs, means the Home Office is powerless to count net migration to Britain accurately.
Instead, ministers must continue to rely on a voluntary survey – the one that, as the Mail revealed earlier this month, underestimated the number of new arrivals from Eastern Europe by 350,000.
The EU rule is another blow for the £500million e-borders programme unveiled in 2003 to check the details of passengers arriving and leaving the UK and to screen them for security purposes.
The scheme has been dogged by IT problems and is still not working fully.
MPs on the Public Administration Committee had said that e-borders – when complete – should be used by the Government to produce accurate figures on net migration.
But yesterday the Home Office said this would not be possible because visitors from the EU cannot be asked how long they plan to stay.
Only those who intend to live here for more than a year are officially classed as immigrants. As a result, the e-borders data would not be complete. In a letter to MPs, the Home Office said asking EU migrants detailed questions ‘would be subject to challenge as disproportionate’.
It continued: ‘It should be noted that EU free movement legislation supported by historical European Court judgments prevent Border Force Officers from routinely asking additional questions… beyond those necessary to establish nationality and identity.’
Last night Tory MP Dominic Raab said: ‘It’s bad enough that EU law has stripped Britain of proper border controls.
‘But it adds insult to injury that, having invested heavily in a system that would enable the authorities to keep track of who is coming and going, Brussels has now banned us from using it.’
The fiasco leaves Britain reliant on the International Passenger Survey, which is based on voluntary interviews with migrants and was described by MPs as ‘not fit for purpose’.
Earlier this month, the Daily Mail revealed that the IPS had failed to count 350,000 Eastern European immigrants because inspectors were at the wrong airports, with only a handful at places such as Luton and Stansted, where hundreds of thousands of migrants were arriving
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