Plans to scrap landing cards for millions of travellers from outside Europe threaten to undermine border security, the government was warned last night.
About 16 million visitors and migrants arriving at airports and ports across Britain will no longer be required to fill in the card under Home Office plans released quietly at the weekend. The move is designed to save £3.6 million a year and speed people through passport controls.
The paper landing card, which has been used for almost 50 years, is set to be scrapped on October 1 as part of the government’s “digital transformation” of border controls. It means that non-EU passengers will no longer have to reveal where they are staying in Britain, or for how long — details also excluded from information they supply before arrival.
Critics questioned the haste of the proposal, which is subject to a consultation, and warned that it risked the loss of valuable intelligence. New digital information on arrivals may not be provided until the end of the year, the consultation document said.
David Wood, former director-general of immigration enforcement at the Home Office, told The Times that the cards were a “useful intelligence tool”, adding: “It seems the most incredible haste to abandon the system of landing cards. We could access them to find out where someone was staying or where they had stayed if we were carrying out an investigation.”
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Landing cards, which are handed to air and sea passengers to complete as they approach Britain, provide personal details of a traveller, including name, date of birth, a contact address in Britain and the proposed length of stay.
Border Force staff can add comments to the cards such as travelling companions, including children, and the amount of cash a person is carrying.
In future, they will rely on “advance passenger information” that every traveller provides before arriving in Britain, including name, gender, date of birth, passport number and the country issuing the travel document. All non-EU passengers will still be checked against criminal and terrorist watchlists.
Tim Loughton, the Conservative MP for East Worthing and chairman of the home affairs committee in the last parliament, said that the decision was at odds with a government-wide drive to increase the amount of immigration data. “It defies logic, at a time when so much effort is being put into improving border security, to remove a long- standing tool like this without a proper replacement and for what is a relatively small saving,” he said.
Airlines and ports, along with officials and academics who use statistics from landing cards, will be consulted over the next four weeks on the plan to scrap them. The consultation document highlighted savings to airlines and shipping companies, a reduction in Home Office costs and an end to the burden on travellers filling them in. This prompted suspicion that the plan is designed primarily to ease pressure on queues at airports such as Gatwick, where staff have been hired to help passengers to complete the cards.
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Lucy Moreton, general secretary of the Immigration Services Union, which represents immigration officers, said: “What the consultation supposes is that cards are only used to provide statistics,” she said. “That simply is not true. The consultation does not say how the intelligence element of the landing card is to be replaced.
“This is being done in an immense hurry. I am surprised it has not been mentioned to us. What I am most worried about is that they are not going to replace the intelligence . . . gathered by officers at the border and that will undermine the security of the border.”
Keith Vaz, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on immigration and visas, said: “The completion of landing cards has always added an extra layer of security providing something is done about the data that is collected. If we are going to move to a digitalised system, it needs to be 100 per cent guaranteed that there will be no technical problems that prevent us getting the information.”
The Home Office did not respond to a series of detailed questions. A spokesman said: “The withdrawal of landing cards will not result in the loss of any data that is used for security checks. All passengers arriving from outside the EU will continue to be checked against the variety of police, security and immigration watchlists, which are used to verify the identity and confirm the status of every passenger arriving at UK airports. This is the latest stage in a wide-reaching consultation and security and immigration colleagues have already been involved in the development of this proposal.”
Q&A: How does the UK’s system of counting migrants work?
Figures on international migration are based on a UN definition which says a migrant is someone who changes his or her country of usual residence for a period of at least a year.
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The Office for National Statistics collects information from voluntary interviews with between 700,000 and 800,000 passengers travelling via main airports, sea routes and the Channel Tunnel to produce estimates of inflows and outflows. It categorises them into areas such as holidays, visiting friends and relatives, work and study.
Are there other information sources?
Some information can be cross-checked against Home Office visa numbers while landing cards provide more detail on those arriving from outside the EU such as the number of religious ministers admitted annually or the number of rich entrepreneurs.
What about people leaving?
Exit checks at airports and ports were abandoned in the 1990s, leaving the government with a dearth of information on who had actually left the country. This was supposed to be solved by the re-introduction of exit checks in 2015, though this has resulted in other challenges, such as matching airline information with immigration system records.
Why not just count everyone in and everyone out?
With 123 million passengers arriving in 2015 imagine the chaos at airports and ports as every passenger was counted at passport control.