Baroness Smith of Basildon rose on the floor of the House of Lords to express her dismay at recent problems at Heathrow.
Baroness Smith said: “My Lords, does the noble Lord find it humiliating that the queues at Heathrow are the butt of Twitter messages and jokes around the world?
“Does he accept the strong criticism from the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration that the problems at Heathrow are caused by massive cuts of 15% of the staff, at the same time as massive organisational changes and a massive lack of good management; or, does he agree with the Immigration Minister in the other place, Damian Green, who says that since May 2010 there has been the wrong kind of wind?
Lord Henley (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Conservative)
“My Lords, the noble Baroness is very selective in what she says about my honourable friend’s evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee yesterday. That is not surprising. I say yet again that all we get from the Opposition is that this is due to a reduction in numbers of staff. It is nothing to do with reductions in numbers of staff.
It is very ironic that the labour party are calling the current conservative lead government as out of touch-when if the Baroness was to visit the airport and see for herself, it is not a case of simply not having enough staff. On a recent homecoming it was evident that although the non-eu queue were being dealt with by 6 staff which was very large, the EU queue also had 6 staff who were siitting around doing nothing. Me thinks that its a case of not using your staff correctly or are the unions involved and stating that if you are dutied for EU on a specific day, then you cannot possibly be expected to transfer to non EU when the need arises?
Once again, another Labour party member spouting incorrect information, not for anything purposeful, but just to slam the Tories.
I thought that was what the opposition was supposed to do! haha.
Haha! Yes, I suppose you’re right! But what I meant was that all they seem to do is criticise the Tories without offering any solutions themselves.
I find it ironic that anyone from the Labour party would even dare to lecture people on immgration and border control. We all know what a roaring success they were at this. But then they never intended to secure our borders did they.
And before anyone lectures or accuses me of being a labour supporter, has the current government stopped immigration ?,
Good point Joe H, nope the current government and those that they succeeded have done absolutley nothing to stem the immigration into the country, mind you the Brits are just as bad really, just look at parts of Spain, not many local spanish left there, also the same in regions of France 🙂
It’s interesting to note that the government has based their budget for the coming year on a population figure of around 64 million. Going back to the last decade, we had a fairly constant population of around 58 million. So there’s been an increase of around 6 million over the Labour years. If British people are leaving at the same rate that immigrants arrive, as was stated by the Labour party at the last general election, that copuld possibly mean around 12 million immigrants coming to this country during the last governments time in office and the first 2 years of the current government. Not that those types of figures would surprise anyone about the Labour parties policies on immigration. Those types of figures would be larger than the combined populations of Scotland and Wales. We didn’t even have those types of movements in population after the last world war. Pathetic