Civil Service Live
Protecting Our Borders
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On the day that the government's new border organisation officially came to being, the woman in charge has outlined the successes already achieved and the challenges ahead.
Lin Homer, chief executive of the UK Border Agency (UKBA), overcame technology glitches and the rigorous rules around passport photos when she spoke to civil servants attending Whitehall and Westminster World's Civil Service Live event in central London on Tuesday.
She was there, with colleagues from across government, to talk about the efforts to protect the country's borders and join up the work of staff from bodies such as UK Visas and HM Revenue and Customs.
Homer emphasised the scale of the work that the 24,000 staff within her new agency faced, quoting figures such as the 218 million passenger journeys a year they must monitor and the 2.5 million visa applications they must process on an annual basis.
“One of the things about the agency is the scale of what we do“, she explained. “We are used to big numbers.“
Although UKBA expects to be in the news because of the sensitive nature of its work, Homer said they needed to get more of their story out there, however hard that might be.
Referring to this week's baggage handling problems at Heathrow's new terminal, she said it was that many people “won't have heard that some of our delivery services are one of the things that have worked really smoothly“.
Other areas of success were tackling illegal workers, and the increasing prosecution of employers, and removals, where work overseas had meant the “equivalent of jumbo jet loads of people from ports such as Lagos“ had been prevented from entering the country illegally.
“One of the things about the agency is the scale of what we do. We are used to big numbers.“
Lin Homer
But Homer emphasised the importance of staff in the agency's success, also revealing that their work was set to be show cased in a television programme to be broadcast later this year
Although a demonstration of the new technology used by UKVisas was proceeded by a glitch-ridden, interactive audience quiz, Homer emphasised that the UKBA was “not scared of technology“.
Biometric programme manager Paul Ellis, using his boss as a guinea pig, showed how the system was able to take ten fingerprints, a digital photo and compare it to government databases within half an hour - even though the original specification had only required two prints and an answer within 24 hours.
Producing a record in little more than three minutes, the system also flags up unacceptable prints or pictures - such as Homer's laughter or badly timed blink - and was delivered early and under-budget, Ellis was proud to report.
In addition, he told the audience that the scheme was to be extended with checks made against the police database, revealing that a trial of the initiative had already identified offenders. “We would not have identified these people by conventional means“, Ellis said.
Staff from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and the Border and Immigration Agency also spoke on the same platform, making the case for greater joint working.
HMRC director of customs and international Doug Tweedle said government departments and agencies had to join up activities at the border or face the cost - as much as £5bn year in the case of customs.
“We must move away from the silo working in the past“, he added, telling delegates that governments in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were all moving in the same direction.
Meanwhile, immigration inspector Colin Jackson and customs detection manager Andy Fraser, both involved with the joint working pilot at Gatwick, explained the traditional cultural and legal differences between their two employers.
It was “a lack of awareness of each others priorities that hindered joint working“ in the past, Jackson said, going on to explain how initiatives such as exchange programmes had broken down the barriers.
But, looking to the future, he said “staff from both services have embraced joint working“.