Airport Security

I too congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Donohoe), both on securing the debate and on his revelation that he serves as a special constable in the British Transport police. I listened to his remarks with great interest and agreed with nearly all of them. I join everyone else who has spoken in congratulating the police, security staff and emergency services, and, indeed, the stout-hearted members of the public who intervened at Glasgow airport, reminding us what citizenship should be about. We must start with the clarification of responsibilities. The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) was quite right to pick up that point from Sir John Wheeler’s report. It must be made crystal clear exactly who is responsible for what. There has been some progress, but there is still a degree of fragmentation. I also agree with the hon. Lady’s remark about a uniformed border force, something for which the Conservative party has been calling for a long time. That, however, is more to do with people coming into the country than with the matter before the House today. It happens that I have some background on terrorist issues from my time in special forces. Between August last year and February this year I had a series of exchanges, both written and in meetings, with the British Airports Authority about security at terminals, focusing on one central concern: that queues for security apparatus are seen as targets of choice by terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), I happened to fly—to America—a week or two after the August incident, and I share the concerns of many that the hold-ups here were much worse than those in any of the busy American airports that I went through. Indeed, in November, Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways, was moved to remark:"““We should accept that for so many of our customers...Heathrow isn’t working...In 25 years, Heathrow could be an aviation backwater, as relevant to the world economy of the mid-21st century as London’s former East End docks.””" Of course the flow at Heathrow has improved immeasurably since Mr Walsh said that, but I share his concerns. However, those concerns go far beyond economic competitiveness. The plain fact is that large numbers of people waiting for security apparatus, concentrated in an indoor location, provide an extremely tempting target for terrorists. For obvious reasons, I did not make my exchanges with BAA public, but I can now reveal that at the meeting in which they culminated, on 7 February, its security manager pointed out to me that as well as providing extra scanners and staff BAA had installed bollards outside the approaches to all its terminals to prevent vehicular access. That, however, is not enough. It is perfectly obvious that any bomber—it need not even be a suicide bomber—can carry or wheel a large bomb in a suitcase straight into the middle of a queue. Those queues are extremely vulnerable and such large concentrations of people in the 21st century, which is, sadly, a terrorist era, are unacceptable. It seems that our thinking has at every stage trailed behind the reality of the terrorist threat that we face, and that each time there is an attack we must learn, although fortunately, in the most recent case, not after people have died. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Government have been wilfully negligent. I am simply trying to understand why we have not quite grasped the nettle. As far back as November 2004 my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), who was then our homeland security spokesman, tabled a question to the Department of Transport asking for"““a statement on security inspections undertaken at British airports.””" The reply was:"““The Department carries out an extensive programme of aviation security compliance monitoring activity. This includes announced and unannounced inspections and tests of the security””. —[Official Report, 1 November 2004; Vol. 426, c. 8W.]" My hon. Friend tabled a similar question in January 2007 and the reply was:"““New aviation security measures which have been implemented at UK airports in light of August’s security alert include the controls on liquids and the limit on the number and maximum size of cabin bags. Other new measures which have been implemented since August are not visible””—" probably for very good reasons—"““to passengers.””—[Official Report, 30 January 2007; Vol. 456, c. 243W.]" I know that our excellent new homeland security spokesman, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, takes a very close interest in all this. Curiously, to my thinking, the Secretary of State makes no mention of access. Terrorists can go wherever the public go. BAA has recruited hundreds of extra security staff and bought extra scanners. Increasing throughput and thus reducing queues is part of the solution, but we must also examine again the issue of perimeter security. For example, at the channel tunnel and some continental seaports there are screening units that will reveal at a glance whether there are illegal immigrants in lorries. I understand that that same technology could be used to take at least a first look at people coming through the doors of security terminals, to see whether they are carrying bombs or weapons. I wonder whether the option of selective scanning of vehicles passing through the gates of airports has been considered. Such pre-scanning, even on an intelligence-led basis, would have a price, but it would materially reduce the threat. Much of the technology that I have outlined was developed in this country. Security has become an extremely successful British industry. Companies such as Qinetiq supply hardware and British firms supply software packages and train people to handle security apparatus. Crucially, as other hon. Members have mentioned, we lead the world in the profiling packages to identify behaviour that is indicative of a terrorist mindset. Of course, no solution is cost-free, but the cost of doing nothing will be much greater, and not only in lives. The airport operators are private companies and if they reap the rewards in the good times, they must pick up the bill in the bad. The Government can help the process along. I shall come in a moment to an area in which funds could be better used. Failure is not only risky. It will also be economically extremely costly to us, and could hand a victory of a different kind to the terrorist. If the security arrangements at our airports are not seen to be both tight and capable of processing large numbers of people without long queues developing, people will go elsewhere. London is still the world’s premier financial centre. Let our airports fall behind and we may find that we lose that edge. American friends of mine have told me that they do not want to use Heathrow again after the experiences that they had in the summer. Technology has another role to play, which goes beyond scanning apparatus. Scanning systems do not prevent conspiracy, and they do not prevent those who are unarmed at the point of departure from going to another country from where they can mount an attack. As the recent terrorist attacks have shown, those people are highly mobile. They criss-cross the world, meeting together. As the security services get better at phone tapping and internet monitoring, the importance to the terrorist of the face-to-face meeting grows. What is needed is to pick up potential problems as early as possible in the process. To pick up on a point that the hon. Gentleman made earlier, a number of countries in the Gulf and New Zealand have a real-time analysis of data at the point of ticket purchase. Alas, the British system, Semaphore, which covers only 12 per cent. of passengers, is based on flight manifests, ensuring that the problems are likely to be identified only after the aeroplane has taken off. With that system we can only export the problem to another country, perhaps by turning the aircraft around, as the Americans do—they have a system like that in place at the moment—or hope to pick people up once they have arrived. By using a system that is based on flight manifests, rather than one that is based on ticket purchases, we lose the opportunity to pick out associations. While an individual’s name might be on a list of suspects, the person with whom they are travelling might not be. A system that is based on checking flight manifests rather than starting with the original ticketing data, as is done in New Zealand, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and several other countries, will not pick up the fact that those two people are travelling together, so only one of them might be stopped. We are tackling problems at the final stage, instead of looking for trouble at the earliest possible stage of each process. After all the mess-ups in the NHS and other areas, I beg the Government not to carry on down the route that they are following with Semaphore and the working party that is very light on experience in this area. We do not need another costly Government-led development of a system that is not much use anyway. Instead, we should take the ticketing software that already exists, off the shelf, which has been so skilfully developed for use in other countries, and develop it into much better systems. We need to work from the beginning of the process. What happens in our airports is only a small part of the battle against terrorism. Thanks to the initiative of the hon. Gentleman, we are rightly focusing on that small part today, but, ultimately, the development of intelligence and many other central areas for which the Government are responsible will be the decisive factors. As I said at the outset, when considering this important issue, which terrorists have chosen as a key battle ground, we must be clear about who is responsible for what. In a free country, we will never have control over where our citizens go, and neither should we wish to. If we try to restrict or curtail basic liberties or our way of life, we hand a different kind of victory to the terrorists by default—something we must never do. However, we are not powerless, and a great deal more can be done.