LONDON, U.K. - The Home Secretary Theresa May (right photo) said she ordered a "pilot" scheme to water down passport checks in July for Britons and other EU nationals without telling Parliament. Up to five million foreign nationals may have entered the United Kingdom during the downgrade, which applied at every port and airport. It will never be known how many were illegals.
May said, "We will never know how many terrorists and criminals entered Britain in the latest borders blunder," made the admission on Monday as she explained to MPs her role in the relaxation of controls this summer.- Senior Home Office sources conceded May agreed to extend the pilot scheme in September — even though she did not know whether it was working properly. Last night a damaging leaked document also revealed that the rule change was brought in to cut queues at airports, not for security reasons.
UK Borders Agency boss Brodie Clark was suspended on Thursday after May was told a separate round of additional checks on foreigners from outside the EU against a "watch list" had also been suspended at Calais as well as some Heathrow fingerprint checks.- But on Monday night the Public and Commercial Services Union which represents hundreds of Border Agency officials claimed the fingerprint checks were actually scrapped months before the pilot scheme was introduced.
- May's critics, however, have still to produce ‘smoking gun' evidence that she knew of Clark's decision to further water down the checks last summer. Labour has disclosed an e-mail which ordered UKBA staff to "cease routinely opening the chip" in biometric passports from the EU.
Officials were also told to stop ‘routinely checking' children from the EU ‘against the Warnings Index', which is designed to weed out possible terrorists and criminal gangs.Extraordinarily, the document makes clear that the downgrade in checks was carried out to "ensure good order in the arrival hall, disruption to flight schedules" and prevent "passengers being held on the aircraft".
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