View From The House - 15th April 2004

Reprinted From The Lichfield Mercury

The Government is right to set targets to measure the performance of public services. The problem is: they set the wrong targets. Whether it be education, health, or immigration, targets have distorted the activities of public services. Teachers have to perform against the wrong criteria while ambulances sit with patients in hospital car parks to prevent starting the stopwatch measuring how long patients have to sit waiting in Accident & Emergency.

But the immigration scandal is one of the worst - particularly at this time of international terror. The love of targets has resulted in the scandal of one-legged roofers from Romania and Bulgaria being allowed into the United Kingdom. How many others have slipped through the net all to ensure that the list of asylum seekers has been reduced in size?

The Conference arranged by the Prime Minister on immigration pointedly included heads of our security services. It follows that there must be concern that terrorists are able to slip in to the country without being detected. It doesn’t surprise me. Although we are an island, there has been concern for some time now regarding the integrity of our air and sea ports. Ignoring for a moment the risk of terrorists entering the United Kingdom, we all recall the foot and mouth outbreak a couple of years back. It is thought to have been caused by the illegal importation of meat. We use food sniffer dogs to detect illegal foodstuffs being brought into the UK. We have around 200 air and sea terminals yet there are only 2 sniffer dogs, shortly to be increased to six, for the whole of the UK! The complacency of the Government is staggering.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine told me he was kayaking off the Essex coast last summer when he spotted a man in a jacket swimming to the shore. When he reported this to the local police, they told him “They are being dropped off by speed boats now. There’s not much we can do about it”.

While I do not oppose the introduction of identity cards, I am not convinced they will make much difference in practice. The police will not be empowered to stop people at random to look at their cards and a suicide bomber will have no concern about being detected after a terrorist outrage. I do wonder whether the Home Secretary’s love of identity cards is just a gimmick. It will have little effect unless our borders are patrolled properly and tighter checks are made on people entering the United Kingdom. What will it take before the Government takes the security of our nation more seriously? And the expansion of the European Union and our refusal to initiate controls like the French and Germans means that there can be free travel into the UK from countries whose borders are even more open than our own.

There may be a temptation to say that Lichfield and the surrounding area is not at risk. But the IRA bombings in Birmingham and the shooting of two soldiers at Lichfield City station should make us all aware that we should all be cautious wherever we are.