Posts tagged "Home Office"

Home Office faces ‘acute’ problem with staff morale

Staff in department more concerned than others about ministers’ reluctance to listen to outside ideas or take well-judged risks

Home Office civil servants have less faith in their department’s readiness to do its job than employees in any other government office, according to the first independent survey of public officials’ views of the coalition’s civil service reforms.

More government employees in the department responsible for Britain’s immigration, security, law and order called for fast action over poorly performing colleagues than any other.

Two-thirds said “incompetent” staff were not identified quickly enough, assessed or offered support and training. This compared to just over half of civil servants across all government departments.

Ministry of Defence civil servants were particularly concerned about colleagues who were not up to the job, with 73% saying recruitment, retention and poor performance were a key area for improvement, against an average of 59%.

Almost 1,400 civil servants, including 500 senior employees, took part in the biggest-ever public survey of civil servants on reform, published on Thursday in the independent newspaper, Civil Service World.

The survey revealed concerns among government workers that appointments were increasingly political. Around 55% of civil servants in both the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education felt colleagues had been employed on the basis of their connections to the Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties. This compared to an overall average of 22%, rising to 26% in the Home Office.

The survey comes just weeks before the coalition is due to publish its controversial proposals for civil service reform. The government has said it intends to reduce the size of the service by about 25% over the next five years.

They also want to commission more from the private sector, give greater powers to communities and councils, and take more “well-judged risks” in the pursuit of innovation.

The findings “indicate a particularly acute problem” at the Home Office, said Matt Ross, editor of Civil Service World.

“Across the civil service, 57% said they were broadly positive about their department’s readiness to face the challenges of the future. Within the Home Office, however, those figures are lower. It’s the only department in which more people — 43% — are broadly negative about the organisation’s capabilities than are broadly positive — 41%.”

Home Office staff also admitted fears that reforms would undermine their efforts to carry out government policy on security-related issues, including drugs, counter-terrorism and ID cards.

More public employees at the Home Office said ministers were reluctant to listen to ideas from outside government, with 71% saying their ministers had a tendency to ignore the views of “stakeholders” – such as the police and criminal justice charities – in favour of their own “fixed ideas about the policies they want to see implemented”. This compared to an average of 57% across the civil service.

A third of those in the department said ministers refused to take “well-judged risks” because of their reluctance to attract criticism, suggesting the Home Office has not recovered from last year’s passport checks fiasco, which saw the head of the UK Border Force, Brodie Clark, step down after the home secretary, Theresa May, blamed him publicly for relaxing entry checks at airports to reduce queues.

Clark’s claim that May “destroyed my reputation” and his legal suit for constructive unfair dismissal was settled in March with a payout of more than £100,000, although the government refused to admit fault.

The survey showed that 81% of civil servants in the Department of Health (DoH) said the civil service’s “risk management skills” needed significant or dramatic improvement. This compared to an average of 59%.

“The government wants the civil service to take more well-judged risk in the pursuit of innovative services,” said Ross. “But when asked their opinion of the civil service’s risk assessment and management skills, only 7% of civil servants overall believe they have the risk management skills they need, while 42% said they need significant improvement and 17% said they need dramatic improvement. When asked why civil servants are wary of taking risks, ‘fear of criticism’ was by far the most popular answer.”

Almost 60% of DoH civil servants identified “the ability to provide impartial, honest and open policy advice to ministers, speaking truth unto power” as one of the top three strengths of the civil service that they were concerned could be damaged by the planned reforms. The average figure was 35%.

Almost 40% of civil servants admitted concern that the government’s cuts, reforms and policies would affect the civil service’s ability to focus on the public good in the face of competing political and financial priorities.

Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the civil service, admitted faults with the way poorly performing employees were handled.

“We have to put our hands up here and say, whilst there has been some improvement in performance management, generally we’ve got to be more consistent and more robust about performance management,” Kerslake told Civil Service World.

Kerslake had a fierce exchange over the reforms last week with Steve Hilton, the prime minister’s senior adviser, that ended with Hilton storming out of the room.

“The consistent message back is that we need to tackle people who are poor performers,” Kerslake said. “I absolutely share and agree with that view, as do ministers.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We have undergone considerable change in the last two years and are now a leaner and stronger organisation.

“Home Office staff are high-performing and flexible, working in partnership to cut crime, control immigration, prevent terrorism and champion equalities.”

• This article was amended on 17 May 2012. The original story contained multiple errors. This has now been replaced in full with a corrected story.

Passport row sapped Home Office staff morale, survey finds

Department responsible for law and order, immigration and security is most demoralised in government

The Home Office is Whitehall’s most demoralised and discontented department, the first independent survey of civil servants’ views of reforms has found.

More employees in the department responsible for Britain’s law and order, immigration and security said their organisation was poorly equipped to cope with the uncertainties and challenges of the future compared with elsewhere in government.

They were also highly critical of colleagues they said were “incompetent”. Two-thirds of the civil servants said the department’s overall performance was being harmed because poorly performing staff were not identified quickly enough and disciplined or offered sufficient support.

This compared with just over half of staff across all government departments. Only the Ministry of Defence scored higher, with 73% of civil servants saying recruitment and retention of suitably qualified staff was a serious problem.

More than 14,000 civil servants, including 500 senior staff, took part in the biggest ever public survey of civil servants on civil service reform.

Matt Ross, editor of the Civil Service World, the independent newspaper that carried out the survey, said: “We consistently found Home Office staff are the most negative about their office’s capabilities, and the most angry and demoralised.”

Home Office staff also admitted fears that coalition reforms would further undermine their efforts to carry out government policy on security-related issues including drugs, counter-terrorism and ID cards.

Ross said the findings showed the Home Office had been undermined by last year’s passport checks fiasco, which saw Brodie Clark, head of the UK Border Force, step down after the home secretary, Theresa May, blamed him publicly for relaxing entry checks at airports to reduce queues.

Clark’s claim that May “destroyed my reputation” and his lawsuit for constructive unfair dismissal was settled in March with a £100,000 payout, although the government refused to admit fault.

But, said Ross, the survey showed that morale at the department had not recovered. “We can see the results of Brodie Clarke being hung out to dry directly in these findings,” he said. “Clarke tried to be innovative by testing out risk-based ideas and was turned on by Theresa May.”

More than 70% of civil servants in the Home Office said they were unable to persuade ministers to accept innovative policies, compared with an average of 57% across the rest of government. The main sticking point was, they said, “a tendency for ministers to have fixed ideas about the policies they want to see implemented’”.

A third of those in the department said ministers refused to take “well-judged risks” because of their reluctance to “approve spending that might be wasted, for fear of attracting criticism”.

The survey also revealed that more than 50% of civil servants in the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education and Skills felt colleagues had been employed on the basis of their connections to the Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties. This compares with 26% in the Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions. Almost 40% are concerned the government’s cuts, reforms and policies will affect the civil service’s ability to focus on the public good in the face of competing political and financial priorities.

Two thirds fear they will lose the ability to “provide impartial, honest and open policy advice to ministers”.

Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the civil service, admitted incompetent staff were not being challenged. “We have to put our hands up here and say, whilst there has been some improvement, generally we’ve got to be more consistent and more robust about performance management,” said Kerslake.

“The consistent message back is that we need to tackle people who are poor performers,” he said. “I absolutely share and agree with that view, as do ministers.”

Fewer than one third of civil servants felt their department is equipped to deliver the coalition’s priorities in tackling the deficit and delivering service reform. They say they are seriously concerned about this failing. In the Home Office, that rose to 43%, with just 41% saying they felt they felt positive about the future.

About half of all civil servants feel alienated and ignored over reforms, rising to 58% in Revenue & Customs. Over 40% of employees complain their IT systems are “inappropriate”.

Two-thirds feel the government’s attempt to encourage greater community action by involving the voluntary and private sectors in policy development and delivery is a “flawed” and “poor idea” that is unlikely to work.

A spokesman for the MoD said: “We are transforming defence and as a result we are creating a smaller, more efficient, professional MoD. We are confident we have the best people to do this. They are trained, motivated and supported to deliver for the Armed Forces on operations. These results are not surprising at a time of reform. However, these changes are being introduced for the benefit of Defence as a whole.”

Extra border staff to be hired

Immigration minister says 70 extra staff will be recruited for September when overseas students are due to arrive

Seventy extra border staff are to be urgently recruited from within Whitehall to avoid a renewed passport crisis at Britain’s airports in September immediately after the Olympics, the immigration minister has announced.

Home Office ministers have cancelled all summer leave for UK Border Force officers and drafted in 480 extra temporary staff from other parts of Whitehall to cope with the expected surge of 650,000 extra tourists this summer.

But the immigration minister, Damian Green, has acknowledged that the Olympic contingency plans could result in severe staff shortages after the Games when tens of thousands of overseas students are due to arrive for the start of the academic year.

He has told MPs that the 70 extra staff to be recruited had been due to be taken on by 2014 for the reopening of Heathrow’s Terminal 2. “We have brought forward the first wave of recruitment for the reopening of Terminal 2 to give Border Force even more flexibility to secure the border while dealing with record passenger numbers at Heathrow,” Green said.

Staff will be recruited from elsewhere in Whitehall and are expected to be in post between July and October after being trained and receiving security clearance.

The minister told the Commons home affairs select committee that a return to a “risk-based” policy of passport checks at Heathrow would not necessarily prove the panacea for long queues after a clampdown last autumn. He said the length of queues at Heathrow and Stansted could depend just as much on the wind as on the nature of the checks, especially for long-haul flights.

If the weather meant that a New York flight was delayed and arrived just behind a Nigerian flight whose passengers had to undergo full passport checks, then the passengers from New York would face longer waits to clear security than if their flight arrived 10 minutes earlier. “That will depend on the wind, over which, with the best will in the world, airlines and the Border Force don’t have the control,” he said.

Green said he was not in principle opposed to the introduction of risk-based controls, but a pilot scheme last year was tainted by unauthorised relaxation of the checks because of queues. “They were not risk-based controls, but queue-based controls,” he said.

“It is not at all obvious that just having risk-based controls reduces queues. They may well involve doing more thorough checks on some of those non-EU passengers,” Green said.

Airline and airport representatives giving evidence to the MPs said there had been a noticeable improvement in queueing times over the past 10 days since David Cameron ordered Home Office ministers to get a grip on the border crisis.

But both Green and Keith Vaz, the chairman of the committee, reported continuing problems at Heathrow and Stansted. Green visited Heathrow privately on Monday morning when the UK Border Force had been told to expect 2,500 passenger arrivals between 6am and 9am. At six hours’ notice this had risen to an estimate of 5,000, and in fact 7,500 passengers turned up. “With the best will in the world you cannot call border staff at home at 1am telling them to turn up for duty at 5am,” Green said.

Vaz complained there had been long delays at Stansted on Sunday night when the border control appeared unprepared to process more than 6,000 passengers who arrived between 10pm and midnight.

Joan Collins became the latest celebrity to be caught up in the passport chaos on Tuesday. She tweeted: “Arrived LHR after great trip on @British_Airways but 1000s waiting at passport control – listen up Ms. May – need more officers!”

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Home Office confirms delay in creation of police ICT company

Department says that new company will now be established in ‘interim form’ from July

The government’s implementation of a new police ICT company is now expected to happen in July, and not spring as previously announced by the Home Office.

The new ICT company, known as ‘newco’, is intended to assume responsibility for a range of ICT-related functions currently performed by the soon to be abolished National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA).

Plans for the new company to be created by spring 2012 were announced by home secretary Theresa May in July last year. However this schedule appears to have slipped, and the company will now be created in “interim form” from July, the Home Office has confirmed.

A spokesman for the Home Office told Guardian Government Computing: “The design proposition for the new company is complete. The Home Office is now discussing the proposals with potential owners and customers.”

Paul Ridgewell, senior analyst at public sector market intelligence firm Kable, told Guardian Government Computing that the delay in the creation of the company was “awkward” for the Home Office given that it had placed great emphasis on having the organisation up and running by spring this year.

“This makes the government’s aim of reducing police ICT spending and improving efficiency all the harder. For suppliers it means a continuation of the uncertainty surrounding ICT procurement in this sector,” he said.

In December, the Association of Chief Police Officers revealed that they were keeping their options open on the possible creation of a police ICT company to take on the technology functions of the NPIA.

The new company will be responsible for the procurement, implementation and management of ICT solutions and associated business change.

The four aims of the company, according to the Home Office, are to:

• Improve the value for money that the police receive from their spending on ICT services.

• Enable greater innovation in police ICT so that officers have access to the best new technologies.

• Free-up chief officers from in-depth involvement with ICT management.

• Ensure services and products support forces and other customers in their drive for interoperability.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

Marchers police themselves as protest calls for role reversal

The tens of thousands of police marching on central London made impressive, and unusually orderly, demonstrators

They were out of uniform, of course, but some habits die hard. As tens of thousands of off-duty police officers gathered in central London on Thursday to march against job cuts and changes to their pension deals, march organisers handed them baseball caps, which the overwhelmingly majority promptly, obediently, put on.

Some of the hats – 16,000 to be precise – were black, to represent the number of jobs that the Police Federation of England and Wales estimates could be lost under proposed cuts to policing services. Others were white, representing nothing more than that they had run out of black ones. It made an impressive image – a long, snaking and terribly well-behaved crowd, looking exactly like a bunch of police officers on their day off.

This was no leisurely day out, however. The march, past the Home Office, the Houses of Parliament and along Whitehall, might have been unusually mannerly – “the quietest demo ever”, as the shadow defence secretary, Jim Murphy, tweeted from his office overlooking the route – but the mood was determined and frequently angry.

“Utterly betrayed,” read the hand-made placard carried by David Ginn, a Metropolitan police dog handler based in south-west London. “No right to strike – every right to be screwed.”

“Of course we’re angry, we’re very angry,” he said as the march set off. “We’ve been treated with the most grotesque disrespect by this government.” It was not all their fault, he acknowledged, and some belt-tightening was necessary. “We will take our share of the hit, but it would seem that our share is disproportionate, because we cannot strike.” Of his team of 10, eight had turned out, all of them either on a scheduled day off or taking leave.

“We’re here to show the public how strongly we feel about this,” said one young frontline officer from Surrey, who, like many of those marching, preferred not to give her name. “I don’t think the public realise what we’re going through.” She signed up three years ago to what she thought was a career for life, she said, but with 20% cuts to the policing budget, she was already seeing job losses among her team and fewer chances of promotion. People feared for the jobs, and she admitted she had thought of looking elsewhere. “The problem is, all the jobs I would be good at, civil service jobs, they are all being cut back too.”

However great the frustration of those involved, it was not only their orderliness that marked this out as no ordinary protest. “All right mate!” shouted one marcher as the demo began to snake towards the Home Office. He had spotted a friend among the on-duty officers charged with policing the demo – distinguished by their fluorescent jackets and slightly bemused air – and bounded across to give him a hug. “Haven’t seen you in ages! What have you been up to?”

Similarly, as the march processed along Whitehall (“Caps off, lads, as we pass the cenotaph”), it passed a number of police vans full of officers keeping an eye on a small, separate demonstration outside Downing Street, against the visit of the Pakistani prime minister. A handful of police marchers began to applaud as they passed the vans. One on-duty officer raised a discreet fist in a salute of solidarity.

As they rounded on to Parliament Square, the marchers encountered a separate protest being co-ordinated by striking public sector workers, and matters became briefly surreal. Some of those holding Unite banners applauded, while one man next to them shouted: “Remember what you lot did to the miners!” A tiny but rowdy group from the Socialist Workers party shouted: “Charge the police!”

“Have a bath,” came the reply.

Simon Newport, a constable with North Wales police in Colwyn Bay, had worked from 6pm to 3am on Wednesday night, and come straight from his shift to catch the coach to London at 4am. It had been a typical night – two assaults, several domestics, paperwork for a couple of arrests. “A quiet one.” All the same, he said, “you would be alarmed if I told you how few of us were on duty … Staff levels are critical.”

Parallel cuts to other services make things even harder, he said, citing a recent example when ambulance service shortages meant an injured woman had to wait so long for treatment that “it led to a public order situation”, requiring the police to make arrests.

“I’m careful not to scaremonger, but for the small force that we are, and the large area we cover, we are close to breaking point at certain times of day.”

Two hundred officers felt strongly enough about the issue to make the journey from north Wales, a pattern echoed in forces across the country. How many had attended in total? The Police Federation was confident there had been more than 35,000. The Metropolitan police, as is now their habit with all protests, declined to say.

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Heathrow to raise landing fees to pay for more border staff

Airport operator BAA plans increase as Boris Johnson complains queues are damaging Britain’s reputation abroad

Airport authorities are drawing up a plan to sort out Heathrow’s passport chaos by levying higher landing fees to fund more border staff, in a move that is believed to have the backing of David Cameron.

Willie Walsh, the chief executive of International Airlines Group, which includes British Airways, told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme the airlines were prepared to pay the higher landing fees as long as the charges led to a competent service. But he warned: “We are not prepared to pay a government that wastes money.”

Walsh said ministerial claims that nobody had waited longer than one and a half hours to get into Britain were untrue, and the continuing passport queue chaos at Heathrow and other airports meant Britain was not open for business. “We need urgent action,” he said Walsh.

The immigration minister, Damian Green, confirmed that the scheme was under discussion between BAA, which owns Heathrow, and the airlines, but he said it had not yet been presented to the Home Office: “I have not had a presentation on that. I do not know the details,” he said. “If somebody comes up with a proposal, we will look at it.”

The plan to raise the airlines’ landing levy to pay for more border staff at Heathrow echoes the deal struck five years ago to end lengthy queues at security gates that were severely disrupting plane departure times.

BAA already levies over £1bn in annual landing charges at Heathrow, with some of the money used to pay for new technology at border control, including the automatic e-passport gates. A major issue in the argument over delays at passport checks is the government’s decision to cut UK Border Force staff numbers by 18% over the next three years, a reduction that critics say is beginning to bite.

The immigration minister made clear he was pinning his hopes of an immediate end to the crisis on the deployment of new “flying squad” teams of border staff who will be rushed from terminal to terminal at Heathrow to deal with unexpected surges in passenger arrivals.

Green also appears to confirm that the government’s pledge to ensure full staffing levels of all border desks at peak times will apply only to the Olympic period and not to the whole of the summer holiday. “The Olympics are a one-off and we need to find a permanent solution,” he said.

Green’s comments came after the Home Office brought in immigration officers from Manchester in an emergency move to help out at Heathrow amid mounting criticism, including from London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, that the persistent queues were damaging Britain’s international reputation.

Queues at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 broke official time limits on 107 occasions during the first 15 days of April, leaked immigration data tables show.

The leaked document detailing queue times for Terminal 3 from April 1-15 show that the 45-minute maximum wait service standard for passengers from outside Europe was breached 82 times. The time limits were not met on 13 of the 15 days. The longest wait faced by non-European passengers was 91 minutes.

For European passport holders, including those from the UK, for whom the service standard is a 25-minute maximum wait, the time limit was breached five times. Even the new fast-track “e-gates” were hit by delays, with the leaked queue times summary showing the standards were breached 20 times during the first two weeks of April.

Labour claimed the figures showed that UK Border Force staff were struggling to cope with passport queues across Heathrow and not just at the high-profile Terminal 5. The shadow immigration minister, Chris Bryant, said the government was displaying “utter incompetence” in not giving the force enough resources to do the job properly.

Facing an emergency Commons question on the passport crisis on Monday, Green insisted steps were being taken to improve the situation at Heathrow and gave a clear pledge that all immigration desks would be fully staffed at peak periods during the Olympics. He was forced to defend a decision to spend £2.5m on new uniforms for UK Border Force workers.

The minister blamed some of the Heathrow problems on severe weather, which he said had led to diverted flights and the “bunching” in arrivals, but conspicuously left open the option of returning to a “risk-based approach” to passport checks. “They are an option any government should consider,” he told MPs.

But he said the leaked data was unreliable and did not accord with the force’s official figures. He said the target was met for European passengers on all 15 days, and on 11 out of 15 days for non-European passengers.

The Commons statement followed the emergence of an open row between Heathrow authorities and the UK Border Force, who blocked the distribution of leaflets to passengers apologising for the lengthy delays and advising them to complain to the Home Office.

The steps being taken to cope with the crisis include a new central control office to co-ordinate how staff are allocated across Heathrow’s five terminals, and mobile rapid deployment units to respond to surges in passenger numbers. New shift patterns had been agreed with staff, Green said.

“The important factor is to have staff that are flexibly deployed in the right numbers, at the right times,” he said. “Border security is Britain’s first line of defence, and it will not be compromised.”

Lucy Moreton, of the Immigration Service Union, spelled out exactly what this policy meant: “A number of staff at Manchester turned up to work today and were herded on to a plane and flown to Heathrow. They got four hours’ work out of them.”

Heathrow waiting times ‘breached 107 times in two weeks’

Leaked immigration figures on Terminal 3 show UK Border Force staff struggling to cope with passport queues, Labour says

The passport queues at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 broke official time limits on 107 occasions during the first 15 days of April, leaked immigration data tables show.

Labour claimed the figures showed that UK Border Force staff were struggling to cope with passport queues across Heathrow and not just at the high-profile Terminal 5.

The disclosure came as the Home Office flew in immigration officers from Manchester in an emergency move to help out at Heathrow amid mounting criticism, including from London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, that the persistent queues are damaging Britain’s international reputation.

Facing an emergency Commons question on the passport crisis, the immigration minister Damian Green insisted steps were being taken to improve the situation at Heathrow and gave a clear pledge that all immigration desks would be fully staffed at peak periods during the Olympics. He was forced to defend a decision to spend £2.5m on new uniforms for UK Border Force workers while squeezing staff numbers.

The minister blamed some of the Heathrow problems on severe weather, which led to diverted flights and the “bunching” in arrivals, but conspicuously left open the option of returning to a “risk-based approach” to passport checks. “They are an option any government should consider,” he told MPs.

The Commons statement followed the emergence of an open row between Heathrow authorities and the UK Border Force, who blocked the distribution of leaflets to passengers apologising for the lengthy delays and advising them to complain to the Home Office.

The leaked document detailing queue times for Terminal 3 from April 1-15 show that the 45-minute maximum wait service standard for passengers from outside Europe was breached 82 times. The time limits were not met on 13 of the 15 days. The longest wait faced by non-European passengers was 91 minutes.

For European passport holders, including those from the UK, for whom the service standard is a 25-minute maximum wait, the time limit was breached five times. Even the new fast-track “e-gates” were hit by delays, with the leaked queue times summary showing the standards were breached 20 times during the first two weeks of April.

The leaked data covers the Easter period when the UK Border Force made a special effort to meet the expected peak in passenger numbers.

Labour’s immigration spokesman, Chris Bryant, said the figures showed the government was displaying “utter incompetence” in not giving the force enough resources to do the job properly.

“They can’t blame it on the weather when there were 107 breaches of their target in the first 15 days of April,” he said.

But Green said the leaked data was unreliable and did not accord with the force’s official figures. He said the target was met for European passengers on all 15 days, and on 11 out of 15 days for non-European passengers.

“Our information shows that queueing times bore no resemblance to some of the more wild suggestions. Border Force data shows the longest queuing time for immigration control was one and a half hours on Friday night at Terminal 5 for non-EU nationals. And times for UK and EU nationals were significantly lower,” he told MPs.

The steps being taken to cope with the crisis include a new central control office to co-ordinate how staff are allocated across Heathrow’s five terminals, and mobile rapid deployment units to respond to surges in passenger numbers. New shift patterns had been agreed with staff, Green said.

“The important factor is to have staff that are flexibly deployed in the right numbers, at the right times,” he said. “Border security is Britain’s first line of defence and it will not be compromised.”

Lucy Moreton, of the Immigration Service Union, spelled out exactly what this policy meant: “A number of staff at Manchester turned up to work today and were herded on to a plane and flown to Heathrow. They got four hours’ work out of them.”

UK border staff flown from Manchester to Heathrow to deal with queues

Immigration staff drafted in to help reduce delays at passport control as Boris Johnson calls on Theresa May to act

Immigration staff have been drafted in from Manchester to Heathrow in an emergency attempt to avert a repeat of last week’s meltdown at the London airport’s passport control which saw passengers facing delays of up to two hours.

The Home Office insisted resources were simply being used flexibly as and when they were needed.

Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Service Union said: “A number of staff at Manchester turned up to work today and were herded on to a plane and flown to Heathrow. They got four hours’ work out of them.”

The head of the UK Border Force, Brian Moore, responded: “We will not compromise border security but we always aim to keep disruption to a minimum by using our staff flexibly to meet demand.

“The vast majority of passengers pass through immigration control quickly. Queues are caused by a number of factors, including incorrect flight manifests or early or late planes which result in bunching.

“The important factor is to have staff that are flexibly deployed in the right numbers at the right times and this is what we always try to do.”

The move came as London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, wrote to the home secretary, Theresa May, telling her that Heathrow airport’s passport queues were creating a “terrible impression” of Britain and needed an urgent solution.

The immigration minister, Damian Green, is to respond to an urgent Commons question on the Heathrow crisis on Monday afternoon.

Johnson, the Tory candidate in this week’s mayoral elections, told the Conservative home secretary that Britain’s main port of entry was “gaining such a poor reputation” that it was undermining London’s reputation as a “welcoming city”.

“It is not of course the first time that these concerns have been raised with government but the need to resolve the situation becomes even more critical in these tough economic times,” Johnson wrote. “I know you will be as concerned as me and I look forward to hearing what measures the Home Office and UK Border Agency plan to take in order to rectify the situation both for the [Olympic] Games and for usual passenger numbers.”

May is to meet representatives from the British Air Transport Association to discuss the problems at Heathrow in a sign of the government’s growing concern about the impact of the chaos on business and tourism.

No details were given of the meeting, but the prime minister’s official spokesman said it would be held shortly. “That [the meeting] is because we don’t want to see long queues at airports. We want to keep queues to a minimum, but we have to do that in a way that doesn’t compromise security,” he said.

The spokesman said the queues had been partly caused by bad weather – a possible reference to storms in mainland Europe last week. Planes cannot take off if there is a storm over the airport.

Leaked emails have revealed the UK Border Force tried to ban Heathrow airport authorities handing out leaflets to passengers apologising for the delays and advising them to complain to the Home Office. The force also tried to enforce a ban on passengers taking pictures of the queues.

The airport authorities hit back . “Ministers may take a dim view about British Airports Authority handing out leaflets telling them how to complain about delays to the UKBA but surely this is entirely in the spirit of putting the customer first – a cause otherwise championed by the government,” said Simon Buck of the British Air Transport Association. “We all want to see robust borders but the fact is this does not have to mean passengers being unnecessarily delayed waiting in immigration halls.”

He said airlines and airports wanted to find a smarter way of addressing the problems: “We do not want to accept that long delays are inevitable. It’s not in the interests of airline and airport operations and certainly not in the interests of the travelling public or the UK’s reputation as a good place to come and visit.”

The emails leaked to the Daily Telegraph show that Heathrow approached “breaking point” last week with passengers left so frustrated by delays that they resorted to slow handclapping staff in immigration halls and in one instance storming past officials without showing their documents. They were later checked before they left the airport.

UKBA “indicative” queueing times suggest that passengers from within the European economic area should wait no longer than 25 minutes and those from outside the EEA no longer than 45 minutes. But delays of up to two hours were being reported by individual passengers, with Twitter awash with complaints from people including Tony Blair’s former spokesman Alastair Campbell and the tennis player Jamie Murray, brother of Andy Murray.

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May faces home affairs committee – live

• Lunchtime summary
• Afternoon summary

9.00am: We’ve got another instalment of Carry on Qatada today. Theresa May, the home secretary, is giving evidence to the home affairs committee about the Abu Qatada affair and, in the light of what David Cameron was saying yesterday, she has some explaining to do. The Daily Mail has got a typically punchy account here.

David Cameron unleashed new chaos over hate preacher Abu Qatada case yesterday.

The Prime Minister claimed that the European Court of Human Rights ‘told’ the Home Office that the time limit for the radical Islamist to appeal against deportation would expire last Monday at midnight.

His claims were met with surprise in the Home Office and sparked accusations from Labour that he lied – forcing Mr Cameron to back track.

May is up at 12.30pm. I’ll be covering the hearing in detail.

As for the rest of the day, here’s the full agenda.

9.30am: Michael Gove, the education secretary, gives evidence to the Commons education committee about school improvement and child protection.

10am: James Murdoch gives evidence to the Leveson inquiry. We’ll be covering the hearing on a separate live blog.

10am: Executives from the credit rating agencies Standard & Poors, Moodys and Fitch give evidence to the Commons Treasury committee.

10.30am: Glencore, the mining company, gives evidence to the Commons international development committee about paying tax in developing countries.

11.30am: Russell Brand gives evidence to the Commons home affairs commitee about drugs. At 12pm Peter Hitchens gives evidence on the same subject.

12.30pm: Theresa May, the home secretary, gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee about Abu Qatada.

12.30pm: Jeremy Browne, the Foreign Office minister, gives a speech on competitiveness and emerging powers.

2.30pm: George Osborne, the chancellor, takes questions in the Commons.

3pm: Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, gives a speech on the NHS Outcomes Framework.

As usual, I’ll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I’ll post a lunchtime summary before 12.30pm and another in the afternoon.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

And if you’re a hardcore fan, you can follow @gdnpoliticslive. It’s an automated feed that tweets the start of every new post that I put on the blog.

9.21am: The Today programme were leading this morning on the news that Newham council in London has asked a Stoke-on-Trent housing association to take on up to 500 families on housing benefit. Sir Robin Wales, the mayor of Newham, and Grant Shapps (pictured), the housing minister, were debating the issue.

According to PoliticsHome, Wales blamed benefit cuts.

We’ve got a waiting list of 32,000, we’ve got hundreds of people looking for places to stay and the result of government benefit cuts, which are still working through as well, means that many more people from wealthier parts of London are looking for places to live in London and they’re just not there.

But Shapps accusd the Labour council of “playing politics” with the issue.

For starters rents are actually, at the moment, falling. They’ve been at lower than inflation for quite some time, these changes came in from last April, over a year ago. There’s a huge fund, £190m of discretionary money, and I’d be interested to hear from Newham why they haven’t called on more of that fund.

My colleague Polly Curtis is looking at this issue on her Reality Check blog.

9.32am: There are two polls around today. Here are the figures.

ICM in the Guardian

Labour: 41% (up 5 points since ICM last month)
Conservatives: 33% (down 6)
Lib Dems: 15% (no change)

Labour lead: 8 points

This is Labour’s highest rating in a Guardian ICM poll since May 2003.

YouGov in the Sun

Labour: 45% (up 4 points since YouGov in the Sunday Times)
Conservatives: 32% (down 1)
Lib Dems: 8% (down 3)

Labour lead: 13 points

Government approval: -40

9.42am: Today the Times has splashed on a story headed: Tide turns in tax war as loophole is closed (paywall). Here’s how it starts.

A landmark victory for Revenue & Customs to deny wealthy investors £117 million in tax relief has ushered in a new era of intolerance towards tax avoidance by the rich.

Eclipse 35, a film investment partnership whose members include Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, was barred from claiming tax relief on a complex £1 billion deal with Disney.

If the 2007 scheme had succeeded, each of the 289 members of Eclipse 35 could have enjoyed an average of £404,000 in tax relief on a personal investment of £173,000. Other investors included Sven-Göran Eriksson, the former England manager, as well as bankers, chief executive officers and hedge-fund managers.

The decision of a tax tribunal could have a wide-reaching effect on dozens of other film schemes as well as other investments designed to achieve high tax reliefs, experts said.

However, one reader is unimpressed. He’s posted this on Twitter.

Brit excitement at closing one minor tax racket.What about the billions in Channel Islands paying nothing.Who’s serious?

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) April 24, 2012

Yup, that’s right. Rupert Murdoch is trashing his own paper’s splash.

9.53am: On the Today programme this morning, Alistair Darling (pictured), the Labour former chancellor, launched a fresh attack on the Eurozone fiscal pact signed earlier this year. I’ve taken the quote from PoliticsHome.

I think the critical thing that has gone wrong here is the Eurozone has signed up to this daft treaty that requires them to impose austerity which is killing off growth, and without growth, of course you never will get your borrowing down. Spain is now back in recession, they can’t meet this target of 3% borrowing in relation to GDP.

The Dutch are probably one of the stronger economies. It looks like they are not going to be able to do it. France, it looks if there is a change of government they’ll want to renegotiate the whole thing.

Surely the time has come now for the Eurozone to recognise the policies they are pursuing at the moment will not work, no-one believes it. Heavens – you’ve even got the IMF at the weekend holding up a war chest because it know it’s probably going to have to bail the thing out.

10.02am: James Murdoch has just started giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry. My colleagues Josh Halliday and John Plunkett are covering it on a live blog.

10.20am: Borrowing figures are out this morning. Here’s the start of the Press Association story about them.

Government borrowing reduced by nearly £11bn over the last financial year, despite a surprise rise in the figure for March.
Public sector net borrowing, excluding financial interventions such as bank bail-outs, was £18.2bn in March, up slightly on a year ago and against City hopes of £16bn, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
But the government still met the budget day forecast, announced by its tax and spending watchdog, for borrowing of £126bn in the year to the end of March.
This was down from £136.8bn the previous year, after revisions in previous months.
Earlier in the financial year, the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted the borrowing figure would fall to £122bn but it effectively moved the goalposts after the economy worsened.
The reduction in borrowing over the year was made with the help of tax increases, such as the hike in VAT to 20% from 17.5% and cuts in Government spending.
March’s borrowing figure, which showed the biggest rise since November 2010, helped push the Government’s net debt back over the £1 trillion mark at 66% of gross domestic product (GDP).

And here’s what Rachel Reeves (pictured), the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, is saying about the figures.

These figures show that last year George Osborne borrowed £9bn more than he planned to at the time of his spending review. The government is now forecast to borrow an extra £150bn because of the higher unemployment and slow growth their failed economic policies have delivered.

10.35am: Councils in England and Wales have cut their pay bill by nearly 10% in real terms over the last year, according to the Local Government Association. Here’s an extract from the news release it has sent out.

Councils in England and Wales have sliced £1.4 billion from their gross annual paybill, the latest Local Government Earnings Survey can reveal.

The reduction represents a 9.7 per cent saving to council taxpayers in real terms and has been brought about by a combination of national pay restraint, the introduction of more efficient work practices – such as amending staff rotas to reduce hours and minimise overtime – and widespread workforce restructuring, which has seen the local government headcount reduced by 214,000 since December 2010.

Job cuts have been achieved largely through voluntary redundancy and not replacing workers after they retire or move to new jobs elsewhere. A significant number of compulsory redundancies have also contributed.

In addition, 90 per cent of councils reduced senior management costs by employing fewer people in senior posts or paying them less, while 79 per cent of all councils reduced the cost of middle managers.

The total gross paybill for councils in England and Wales for 2011-12 was £24.9bn. That was 5.2% down on the previous year, and 9.7% down in real terms (ie, taking into account inflation).

10.54am: You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today’s paper, are here.

As for the rest of the papers, here are three stories that are particularly interesting.

• George Parker in the Financial Times (subscription) says Tory MPs want the coalition to find “a heavy-hitting minister, capable of closing down awkward stories”.

Many Tory MPs complain the coalition does not have a minister willing to “take a bullet for the team”, fielding questions across a wide range of subjects and stopping bad stories before they get out of control.

“A lot of them run for cover the moment there is any bad news,” says one senior Tory MP, reflecting on a raft of stories which were allowed to escalate, ranging from the taxes on pasties, grannies and charities, to the mishandling of the possible fuel strike and the botched Qatada deportation.

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former media chief, says his boss knew the importance of delegating the job of defending the government.

“Cameron risks becoming a one-man band by comparison, unless he starts to liberate himself from the need to be his own spokesman the whole time,” he said.

• Tim Shipman in the Daily Mail says David Cameron is launching a campaign to target aspirational ethnic minority voters.

Baroness Warsi [the Conservative co-chairman] said: ‘There are at least ten constituencies that we should have won at the last election, on the basis of the overall swing we achieved, but which we didn’t win purely because they were seats with a much larger than average black and minority ethnic population.’

Lady Warsi admitted that many of her colleagues have been surprised to discover that they have far larger migrant populations in their constituencies than they previously realised.

She added: ‘Somewhere like Solihull now has more than 5,000 British Muslims. These are upwardly mobile people.’

• James Kilner in the Daily Telegraph says Tony Blair has appeared in a video promoting Kazakhstan.

In the 67 minute film produced by Kazakh state television Mr Blair praised Kazakhstan, where he works part-time as a presidential adviser, for its progress since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

“It’s a country almost unique, I would say, in its cultural diversity and the way it brings different faiths together and cultures together,” Mr Blair said in the video.

11.14am: Ed Miliband has given an interview to James Macintyre for Prospect.

It’s wide-ranging, but the line that interested me most was Miliband’s admission that redistribution is not the only route to social justice. Here’s the key quote.

The task for us is to show we understand we’ve got to change our economy. That’s right because the social democratic project is not just about spending more money. It’s about changing the way your economy works. And that’s what responsible capitalism is all about. It’s particularly important because other routes to social justice are more limited … Social justice not just after the fact through redistribution … Redistribution is important but it’s not the only route to social justice.

I can’t find the full article on the web yet, but I’ve got a copy and there are a few other points worth flagging up.

• Macintyre says some people “close to the Labour leader” have their doubts about Ken Livingstone. “Off the record, some close to the Labour leader are cool about Livingstone, pointing out that he became the party’s candidate for mayor before Miliband became leader,” Macintyre writes.

• He says Ed Balls has admitted privately that he would not have taken on News International in the way that Milband did last summer. Macintyre also quotes Miliband as saying there is a lesson in what happened for all politicians.

It’s a lesson isn’t it? It’s a real lesson, for all politicians … Orthodoxies are truths which everybody believes are just unbreakable, until they are broken. And when they are broken you can’t find anybody who thinks it was wrong. Look, it’s an interesting lesson about how you can change the terms of debate.

• Macintyre says Miliband would not comment on the Guardian story saying Labour were thinking of taking action to stop sitting MPs standing down to stand for election as mayors.

11.27am: Russell Brand is about to give evidence to the Commons home affairs committee about drugs.

Here’s the explanation from the committee as to why Brand has been called. It says he will give evidence “about his own experiences and about his latest project, a documentary of the nature of addiction and how it is viewed by society”.

11.37am: Russell Brand is about to start. He is giving evidence with Chip Somers, chief executive of the Charity Focus12 which helped Brand deal with his addiction.

11.38am: Brand starts with a cheery “hello” to members of the public who are in the room.

Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, starts the questioning.

Q: You say in your written evidence that you do not agree with legalisation because it is necessary to have a deterrent effect. Is that right?

Brand says he considers drug use more of a health issue than a legal issue. In some respects there may be a case for decriminalisation, he says. But he thinks the criminalisation of addicts is not helpful.

Q: You are a former heroin addict. Can you say how you became an addict, and how you got off it?

Brand said a “spiritual malady” was to blame. He was sad, lonely and unhappy. Drugs and alcohol seemed an answer. Once he addressed the underlying problem, he was able to get off drugs. He was treated at Focus12 where they promote “abstinence-based recovery”.

Q: You were arrested roughly 12 times.

It was rough, says Brand.

Q: When you were arrested, did you have the support you needed?

Brand says there is “confusion and ignorance” around addiction. Lots of drug addicts are anti-social. They are a nuisance. When he was arrested, he felt the police were doing what they had to do.

Q: What do you think about legal highs? Are they the drug of choice for young people?

Brand says he does not know because he is not young enough any more. But he knows that young people will always want to get high.

We need to address the mental and spiritual problems leading people into taking drugs, he says.

11.45am: Michael Ellis, a Conservative, goes next.

Q: Is addiction self-induced? And does it involve victims?

Brand says the victims of drug-related crimes need to be taken care of. He says he met a senior police officer recently who argued that addiction should be seen as an illness. Brand says he committed crimes when he was an addict. Chip Somers was an armed robber.

Q: So does there need to be a carrot and a stick?

Brand says there is no need for a carrot or a stick. Addicts need love and compassion.

Q: Celebrities play a role that is not insignificant.

Brand says he would argue their role is insignificant.

Q: Would you like to be a role model?

Brand says he has no control over the way his image is used in the media.

Q: But your behaviour affects how you are reported.

Brand says different papers will report the same event in different ways. He says celebrity is a “vapid, vacuous concept used to distract people from what is important”.

Vaz intervenes.

Q: Do people need to know more about where drugs come from?

No, says Brand. People do not care about matters like this.

11.53am: Bridget Phillipson, a Labour MP, goes next.

Q: Focus12 has three high profile patrons: Brand, Devina McCall and Boy George. Does that show more understanding of addiction? Or does that mean drug use has become socially acceptable?

Somers says some celebrities have made the situation worse by appearing to condone drug use.

11.56am: Somers says children need more honest information about drugs.

It is no use going into schools and just saying drugs are bad, he says.

You have to give both the positive and the negative side of it … Unless you’re honest, people won’t listen.

11.57am: Julian Huppert, a Lib Dem, goes next.

Q: Do abstinence treatements work for all drug addicts?

Somers says abstinence would be a good aim for everyone. People on methadone do not lead stable lives, he says.

Q: Should there be less money spent on the policing of drug possession?

Brand says that is a “brilliant idea”. He was arrested several times for possession. It would be better to spend the money on treatment.

Somers says an awful lot of money is wasted on small-time possession. Minor possession “is just part of the everyday life of being an addict”.

There is a massive difference between legalisation and decriminalisation, he says. He is not in favour of legalisation.

12.01pm: Lorraine Fullbrook, a Conservative, goes next.

Q: Are you in favour of decriminalistion?

Yes, says Brand.

Somers says he is in favour of decriminalisation. But he does not support legalisation, because there is no justification for the use of most drugs.

Q: What about cannabis?

Somers says that might be the one drug where you could make a case for legalisation. But he says he is not advocating its legalisation.

12.04pm: Michael Ellis goes next.

Q: If you ignore minor offending, won’t that lead to more serious offending?

Brand says being arrested is not a lesson. It is just an “administrative blip”, he says.

Calling Ellis “mate”, he says he needs to show some compassion. He says he can tell Ellis is a Tory from his question.

Keith Vaz says the committee is running out of time.

Brand says you can never run out of time. Theresa May might not show up. She might not know what day it is.

Labour’s David Winnick tells Brand this is “not a variety show”.

12.08pm: That’s it. The session with Brand is over.

Theresa May will be up in half an hour.

12.20pm: The Press Association have filed a quick story on Russell Brand’s evidence. Here is the start of it.

Comedian Russell Brand said he became addicted to drugs because of emotional and psychological difficulties, adding “it was rough”.
The flamboyant film star said addiction should be treated as a health issue rather than a criminal matter.
He called for “abstinence-based recovery” as he gave evidence about his own battle with addiction to MPs reviewing the government’s drugs policy.
Brand has given frank accounts of his battle to overcome drug addiction and has said society needs to change the way it views addicts.
Brand, who arrived at the hearing wearing a black hat, gold chains and crosses and a torn black vest top, said he was not calling for “a free-for-all where everyone goes around taking drugs”.
Addicts will always be able to get drugs, he said, whether they are illegal or not.
However he added he was not qualified to talk about legalisation.
Instead, he said addiction should be treated as an illness and society should recognise that addicts, with the proper help, can become active and useful members.
He said society should not “discard people, write them off on methadone and leave them on the sidelines”.
Instead, society should “neutralise the toxic social threat they pose as criminals”.
Asked if there should be a carrot and stick approach, he said it should be more about “love and compassion”.
Speaking rapidly and addressing committee members by their first names, Brand dismissed suggestions that addicts cared where their drugs came from or the consequences of their production.
“I don’t think they’re going to be affected by that because they’re normally on drugs,” he said.
Asked about the role of celebrities, he said: “Who cares about bloody celebrities?”
Brand said that, instead, he wanted to offer people “truth and authenticity”.

12.23pm: The Press Association have also reported Russell Brand’s response to the Labour MP David Winnick, who accused Brand of treating the hearing like a variety show. (See 12.04pm.)

You’re providing a little bit of variety though, making it more like Dad’s Army.

12.50pm: Theresa May, the home secretary, is giving evidence to the committee now.

Keith Vaz, the chairman, starts. He says May has been invited to talk about various aspects of her job.

Q: Are you still enjoying your job?

Yes, says May.

Q: On Abu Qatada, the committee would commend the work you have done. Yesterday David Cameron says the European court of human rights have given the Home Office assurances about last Monday being the deadline. Do you have any emails or letters or notes of calls saying the deadline was 16 April not 17 April?

May says she will set out the situation.

As Cameron says, the Home Office was “of course” in contact with ECHR officials about the deadline.

May says her advice said the deadline was midnight on 16 April.

She was aware that there was some speculation on Monday night about the deadline.

The court always made clear that it was for the grand chamber to determine the deadline.

But she had “unambiguous” legal advice saying the deadline was on the Monday night. She accepted that. She decided to go ahead with the arrest of Abu Qatada on the Tuesday.

Q: You are saying you acted on advice. But you have 61 legal staff in the Home Office. Bindmans have two lawyers looking at this. The BBC’s Danny Shaw was told the deadline was on the Tuesday. Can the government legal service give you an email or letter confirming the deadline was 16 April? If not, why did Bindmans know the deadline was different.

May says the court decided through the grand chamber’s panel of judges when the deadline is.

The British government based its decision on article 43 and past precedent that Monday was the deadline.

She wanted to resume deportation at the first opportunity.

Q: You are not answering the question. Wouldn’t it have been wise for the government legal service to get something in writing? Do you have anything in writing?

May says the decision about the judgement will be taken by the judges.

Q: So are you saying an application on 18 April would have been in time?

No, says May. She is saying the court takes the final decision.

Q: But there is no inherent jurisdiction to alter time limits. Have you gone back to your officials to ask them to look at the paperwork?

May says the only people who can decide what the deadline is are the panel of judges from the grand chamber. Both parties have to take legal advice on what the deadline is. May says her legal advice said it was on Monday.

Q: So you are telling the committe that there is nothing on file?

May says she is telling the committee that the judgment will be made by judges on the panel.

1.11pm: I’m having some technical problems. I hope to sort them out soon.

1.11pm: The problem seems fixed. Back to Theresa May …

1.12pm: Labour’s David Winnick is asking the questions now.

Q: Does it occur to you that Abu Qatada is laughing about all this?

May says she was always clear about the fact that Qatada could use legal procedures to delay his deportation for some months.

Q: So you do not accept the comments about this being a farce?

May says taking unambigous legal advice, acting on it and acting as quickly as possible to deport a dangerous individual is not farcical.

Q: What do you say to people who think it is quite likely that he will still be here at the end of the year?

May says it may take “many months” to get rid of him. But she is confident that he will be deported.

Even if the ECHR does not decide to accept an appeal, Qatada can take legal action in the UK.

1.16pm: Lorraine Fullbrook, a Conservative, is asking the questions now.

Q: Are you confident that Abu Qatada will be deported?

Yes, says May.

Q: Do you accept that he has to be removed lawfully?

Yes, says May. When he gets deported, it is important that he remains deported. The government has to act under the rule of law.

1.18pm: Labour’s Steve McCabe goes next.

Q: If the court decides to accept the appeal, will that mean that the legal advice you received was wrong?

May says the court does not give reasons for its decisions. If it accepts the referral, it will not say why. So the issue of the deadline will not be part of that.

Q: So they could accept the appeal, without saying why?

May says she understands that that is normal practice.

Q: If the appeal is upheld, will Abu Qatada be able to sue the government?

May says the advice she has received is that the government acted properly.

1.20pm: Mark Reckless, a Conservative, goes next.

Q: You say if you deport Abu Qatada now you will be breaking the law. Why?

May says the government abides by the international treaties that Britain has signed. The law requires the government to act in accordance with its published guidance. If if ignored this, it could be subject to judicial review.

If the government wants to deport someone, it has to give 72 hours’ notice. If it did this, Abu Qatada would get an injunction. If the government ignored that, it would be breaking UK law.

Q: Are you certain he would get an injunction?

May says you can never be certain what decisions judges will take.

Q: But why don’t you test this?

May says there could be a judicial review as well as an injunction. There would have been a point of law to test.

1.25pm: Keith Vaz asks another question.

Q: Do you have assurances from Jordan in writing?

May says she has several letters which she could put to a court.

Q: Is Abu Qatada getting legal aid to take his case to the ECHR?

May says he is not receiving legal aid in relation to his ECHR proceedings. But he can qualify for legal aid in relation to the proceedings in the UK. May says the decision about whether he gets it is not up to her.

Q: How much legal aid has he received over the last nine years?

May says she does not know. But in recent years most of his legal actions have involved the ECHR, and they would have been privately funded.

Q: Do you plan to look at the way legal advice is given to you? Or do you think you are getting the best legal advice?

May says she is satisfied with the legal advice she is getting.

1.32pm: The Abu Qatada part of the hearing is now over. But May is taking questions on other issues.

First, Heathrow.

Lorraine Fullbrook is asking the questions.

Q: Are you sure you have got enough passport staff on duty at Heathrow?

May says there has been a lot of planning. There will not be one single peak day.

Q: Is there a fast-track system for athletes?

May says there will be a separate lane for “Games family members”.

Vaz asks about Brodie Clark’s article yesterday saying that May should go back to the intelligence-led system being piloted last year.

May says there was predictions that there would be huge delays at Easter. But those delays did not materialise.

1.37pm: Labour’s Alun Michael goes next.

Q: You have split the UK Border Agency. There is not a Border Agency and a Border Force. What do they both do?

May says the Border Force protects the borders. The Border Agency implements the government’s immigration policy, she says.

Q: But won’t it be hard to define who does what?

May says these issues existed when the Border Force was part of the Border Agency.

By separating the Border Force, the government will ensure that it has a “clear focus” on protecting the border.

1.42pm: Mark Reckless goes next.

Q: You said that Border Agency officials who put border security at risk would be punished. Have people been punished?

May says there were disciplinary proceedings. The then head of the Border Force [Brodie Clark] has left.

Q: Did his punishment extend to six figures?

May says she cannot discuss his settlement.

Q: Why did you not read all the weekly updates on the new passport control regime being piloted?

May says she did read all the reports. But she accepts that, in his report into this affair, John Vine said that some reports were not sent to her. She could not read reports that were not put in her red box, she says. She does not know why she did not receive them.

1.46pm: Labour’s Steve McCabe asks about out-sourcing police services.

May says she is “open-minded” about this.

1.47pm: Julian Huppert, a Lib Dem, asks about extending internet surveillance.

Q: What are you going to be doing?

May says there are a lot of myths about what is planned. People think they will be reading email in real time. They won’t.

The government can already monitor who is talking to whom by phone. But, as technology changes, people are communicating in different ways. She wants the intelligence services to be able to monitor these contacts.

Q: What do you want the law enforcement agencies to be able to do that they cannot do already? Most of this data is encrypted. Are you planning to place black boxes on internet service providers to allow this data to be decrypted?

May says this is a technical detail.

Keith Vaz says it might be helpful to have another session on this subject.

Q: Sir Tim Berners-Les said these plans would destroy human rights? Do you agree?

May says she does not know what plans he was talking about.

1.53pm: Labour’s David Winnick asks May if she is proposing to extend surveillance.

May says she wants to apply the existing controls to new technology.

1.54pm: Michael Ellis, a Conservative, asks May if she is planning to extend controls to things like Skype to stop criminals.

May says that is correct. She says people have been sending her their emails because they think she wants to read them. She doesn’t, she says.

1.56pm: Labour’s Bridget Phillipson goes next.

Q: Are you concerned that about the way Twitter has been used to name a rape victim?

Yes, says May. But she cannot give an answer today about what can be done about this.

Q: But you accept this could deter other women reporting rape?

Yes, says May.

2.00pm: Keith Vaz is asking the final questions.

Q: When will you take a decision about the extradition of Gary McKinnon?

May says she has recently received fresh representation from McKinnon’s lawyers.

Q: Are extradition arrangements between the UK and the US being reviewed, as David Cameron and Barack Obama agreed at their recent meeting?

May says this issue is being looked at.

Q: Will there be a new inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence case in the light of the corruption allegations?

May says there will be an urgent question in the Commons on this this afternon. The Guardian story yesterday implied she had already made up her mind, she claims. She hasn’t. There are some issues that need to be “bottomed out” before she agrees to a new inquiry.

Q: Are you concerned about the number of cases of racism in the Met?

Yes, says May. She is always concerned about cases of racism.

Q: Are you happy that a supergrass has been rehoused at public expense? Are these reports accurate?

May says the CPS considered ‘very carefully” the benefits of entering into this agreement. The police said there were considerable benefits. Co-operating with the police has been a long-standing feature of the criminal justice system.

Q: You are only the second female home secretary. Does it irritate you when the press concentrate on your shoes?

May says this affects other politicians too. People make comments about Ken Clarke’s shoes, she says.

That’s it. The hearing is over.

2.20pm: Here, a little later than usual, is a lunchtime summary.

• Jeremy Hunt has been accused of acting as a “cheerleader” and operating a secret back channel with News Corporation executives to assist the passage of the company’s bid for all of BSkyB. As the Guardian reports, the charges emerged during questioning at the Leveson inquiry over a series of emails submitted to the inquiry by Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman and chief executive. The hearing is still going on. You can follow it on our live blog.

• Theresa May, the home secretary, has suggested that she has nothing in writing to prove the the European court of human rights told the Home Office that the deadline for Abu Qatada to submit an appeal was last Monday. At a home affairs committee hearing, Keith Vaz, the chairman, asked her six times if she had emails or notes of a call to prove that the Home Office was told that Monday was the deadline. May repeatedly dodged the question. But she did insist that she had “unambiguous legal advice” from the government’s lawyers saying Monday was the deadline. During the hearing Vaz made it clear that he did not hold her personally responsible for what appears to be an error, and Tory MPs on the committtee were generally supportive. In the hearing May also covered other subjects including delays at Heathrow, a possible new inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence investigation and internet surveillance. My colleague Alan Travis has been covering it on Twitter.

• A lawyer for Peter Hain, the Labour former Northern Ireland secretary, has questioned the legality of the Northern Ireland attorney general’s decision to prosecute him for criticising a judge in his memoirs. David Dunlop told a court hearing in Belfast: “One issue is whether the offence of contempt the attorney general seeks to prosecute actually remains in existence in terms of common law.” But John Larkin, the NI attorney general, defended his action. He said the contempt case against Hain involved public confidence in the administration of justice, rather than the interest of a judge in protecting his reputation. “Citizens are entitled to have confidence in the administration of justice; they should not be improperly deprived of this entitlement or have it endangered,” Larkin said.

• The Office for National Statistics has published figures showing that the British government borrowed more than expected last month, but still managed to meet its target for the financial year.

• Peter Cruddas, the former Conservative party treasurer who resigned in March after the Sunday Times filmed him claiming that large cash payments could secure dinner with David Cameron, has complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the story.

• Michael Gove, the education secretary, has rejected claims from Jamie Oliver that the extension of academies has undermined nutritional standards in schools. Giving evidence to the Commons education committee, he said: “I love Jamie Oliver. I would be interested to see any evidence to see any academy that has implemented lower quality food. All the evidence shows that they have raised the quality of food. I don’t have any evidence they have been letting children down.”

• Ministers have defended the government’s housing benefit cap after it emerged London’s Newham council tried to find homes for some families 160 miles away.

• Chris Grayling, the employment minister, has claimed that the latest figures show that 54% of people who go through the work capability assessment are found fit for some form of work.

• More than 30 London Labour MPs have complained that Boris Johnson has been trying to hide the pollution problem in the capital by gluing particles to the road.

2.55pm: Here’s David Cameron in a speech last November.

The fact that we export more to Ireland than to Brazil, Russia, India and China combined shows just how reliant we are on Europe.

Cameron has actually made this claim repeatedly. At one stage, I think, Nick Robinson even described it as Cameron’s “favourite fact”.

It’s a powerful revelation. But there’s a problem. It’s not true.

And how do I know? Jeremy Browne (pictured), a Foreign Office, said so in a speech this afternoon. Here’s his quote.

Most of our exports go to ‘established markets’ – such as the European countries, America, Japan and Australia. That explains the now well-rehearsed fact that we export more to Ireland than we do to the BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – combined. I am told that not actually true, but does hold if you remove Russia from the club.

Browne is, of course, a Liberal Democrat. That means his promotion prospects don’t depend upon his relationship with Cameron – fortunately.

UPDATE at 3.40pm: My Press Association colleague tells me that it was actually Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s economics editor, who described the Ireland/Bric figure as George Osborne’s favourite fact. I may have muddled that up, unless Nick Robinson also described it as Cameron’s favourite fact. Nevertheless, it is certainly a “fact” that Cameron has cited in public on several occasions.

3.06pm: In the light of Theresa May’s appearance before the home affairs committee, Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, is now saying May took “significant risks” that could delay Abu Qatada’s deportation. Here’s an extract from her statement.

Abu Qatada should be deported as rapidly as possible and kept in custody in the meantime.

Yet the home secretary’s evidence this morning shows she has taken significant risks which may make it harder not easier to deport Abu Qatada and directly contradicts the prime minister’s claims yesterday.

The home secretary made clear she did not get any assurances from the court that said the deadline was Monday 16 April. Nor did she contact the court on Monday after the Home Office were told by journalists that the European court was saying the date was Tuesday instead.

The home secretary also admitted that she was “aware of speculation” over the deadline on Monday.

Why then did she still take the risk and go ahead with the statement?

Why did she not wait 24 hours so there could be no shadow of a doubt, and so she did not play into the hands of Abu Qatada’s lawyers?

3.36pm: Here’s an afternoon reading list.

• Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast think the West is moving leftwards.

As for Britain, where the Tory government I support embraced immediate fiscal austerity to avoid a pummeling by the financial markets, the best that can now be said is that a double-dip recession has been narrowly avoided – because growth in the first quarter of 2012 is forecast to be … 0.1 percent. The country’s AAA rating is also increasingly at risk, after a full-bore austerity regime …

The target for structural budget balance has been set back past the Coalition’s original five year goal. The Tories will have to seek re-election after brutal austerity without having made a real dent on the actual debt problem. And if US political deadlock continues past the November election, the impact of sudden sweeping austerity in the US will likely tip Europe into an even deeper crisis …

I may be wrong, and it doesn’t thrill me, but my bet is that the West is moving leftwards for pragmatic reasons. And that America will not be immune. Pendulums swing, and the long free market period of 1979 – 2007 is giving way to a more government-based management of the unintended consequences of the right’s initial success and subsequent over-reach. And if Obama doesn’t use Europe as a warning sign for what Romney would bring to America, he’d be missing out on an important opportunity.

(Thanks to Ian70 in the comments for flagging this up.)

• Alastair Campbell on his blog thinks David Cameron’s media blitz yesterday was a mistake.

Being on telly from PMQs. Fine. Being on telly from summits and big speeches with big points to make. Good. But stop being your own spokesman on running stories of the day.

Nadine Dorries has said all that before, about you and George being posh boys who don’t get people’s lives. That’s the other thing that happens when the mood changes – things people ignored in good mood times suddenly gain traction in bad mood times.

But there was something a bit demeaning about seeing a Prime Minister sit there and have her words read to him, and ‘hit back’ with a hurt look and stories of his supermarket shopping so that he could reveal he knew the price of milk.

• Dave Hill at Comment is free on why he’s voting for Ken Livingstone.

At first, Johnson’s win was no catastrophe. He had Livingstone projects to complete and Labour government cash to spend. He made cuts but invested, too. Some termed his approach “Ken-lite”. Johnson backed the London Living Wage – a voluntary higher rate than the statutory national minimum, reflecting the capital’s crazy living costs – and lobbied for amnesties for irregular migrants.

Then came the coalition and cold, hard austerity. Too many Londoners are paying a high price and, as a steelier Johnson seeks re-election, two cities are emerging in Dickens’s bicentennial year. No Olympian triumph will make the one that is enduring hard times disappear. That London needs a champion and Johnson does not qualify.

• LabourList says Lucy Powell is stepping down as Ed Miliband’s deputy chief of staff.

3.50pm: There’s another poll out today. It’s from Ipsos MORI. Here are the headline figures.

Labour: 38% (up 1 point from last month)
Conservatives: 35% (down 1)
Lib Dems: 12% (up 1)

Labour lead: 3 points.

But perhaps the key thing is what the poll says about George Osborne. Here’s an extract from the Ipsos MORI news release.

George Osborne’s personal ratings as Chancellor have also fallen sharply. 58% are unhappy with the way he is doing his job (28% are satisfied), a year-on-year decline from 23% dissatisfied in June 2010 and 45% in March 2011. These are the worst ratings for a Chancellor Ipsos MORI has found since Ken Clarke in December 1994.

The only consolation for Osborne is that Clarke is generally reckoned to have been quite a good chancellor.

4.15pm: Here’s an afternoon summary.

• Jeremy Hunt has indicated that he is not resigning. This afternoon the Leveson inquiry has heard fresh evidence about the extensive contact between Hunt’s office and News Corporation in the run up to Hunt having take the decision about whether to allow News Corporation’s bid to take over the whole of BSkyB to go through. But sources close to Hunt have said that proper procedures were followed and that Hunt will not be quitting. Number 10 has said David Cameron has full condfidence in Hunt.

• The Commons culture committee has said that it’s long-awaited report on phone hacking will be published next Tuesday at 11.30am.

• James Brokenshire, a Home Office minister, has said that no decision has been taken yet on whether to have a fresh inquiry into the Stephen Lawerence investigation. Answering an urgent question on this in the Commons, Brokenshire said Theresa May, the home secretary, had offered to meet Stephen’s mother Doreen to discuss this further. Doreen Lawrence has said there should be an inquiry into new allegations about the way police corruption could have protected the killers.

• The Labour peer Lord Winston has condemned Ken Livingstone, his party’s candidate for London mayor. Winston made the comments on the Daily Politics show.

I don’t really understand how we have arrived in the Labour Party at choosing Ken Livingstone, who I think has been shown to be quite a tricky sort of customer. I would have thought we would have had a fresher view about how London might be led … I think he has espoused some disastrous causes and some of his comments on international politics seem to me to be extremely unhealthy.

• Michael Gove, the education secretary, has said that eight academy schools have been put on notice that they must boost their standards or face action.

That’s it for today. Thanks for the comments.

Incoming search terms:

• uk border agency

Future of full passport checks at British airports in doubt

UK Border Force says selective approach to arriving passengers not ruled out as airlines warn of possible ‘gridlock’

A policy of full passport checks on all arriving passengers at Heathrow, Gatwick and other British airports may yet be lifted in the face of renewed complaints about lengthy queues in the immigration halls, the Home Office has indicated.

The home secretary, Theresa May, imposed full passport checks on all air and sea passengers arriving in Britain last autumn in the aftermath of the Brodie Clark affair during which she criticised his use of a “risk-based” approach to selective passport checks when he was head of the UK Border Force.

“We have never ruled out a risk-based approach,” said a Border Force spokesman on Monday. “What we need is clear evidence that it works. And it was made impossible to evaluate with the unauthorised relaxation of the checks in last year’s pilot. We will always put security first, and during the Olympics we will be providing the staff needed to carry out full checks.”

The first indication of a return to a more selective approach follows high-profile complaints from 11 airlines, including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, that the home secretary must authorise more border control staff at the passport desks or relax the full checks on all passengers rule if they were not to face “gridlock” during busy periods.

May is expected to be questioned about the persistent delays at Heathrow on Tuesday by the Commons home affairs committee.

Immigration staff unions claim that Home Office ministers rejected a Border Force plan to recruit more staff three weeks ago.

Willie Walsh, boss of International Airlines Group, which owns British Airways, blamed the long immigration queues on the Home Office allocating “inadequate resources” for border controls. Speaking at the UK launch on Monday of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane, he accused the government of “undermining” airports such as Heathrow.

Asked how queues could be cut before the London 2012 Games, Walsh said that worrying about preparation for Olympic visitors ignored current problems. “We are on the world stage now,” he said. “This is a fine airport, Terminal 5 is fantastic, [BAA chief executive] Colin Matthews is doing a fine job, but everything they can do is being undermined by the government.”

The first signs of movement by the home secretary also follows a warning on Monday from Clark, that the policy of full border checks would have to be abandoned as it was causing lengthy queues and undermining security by reducing staff to little more than “box tickers”. He told the Times: “Nothing is surer, it [selective checks] will be reintroduced at some stage in the future.”

Passengers faced hours of delays at Gatwick airport last week, but similar delays have occurred at Heathrow and elsewhere. Aviation leaders have long expressed their anger at waiting times over which they have no control, especially as many have invested in streamlined check-ins, new terminals and enhanced baggage screening areas to minimise the time passengers spend in non-retail areas of the airport.

Home Office guidelines says that passengers from outside the European Economic Area should be able to get through passport control within 45 minutes and passengers arriving from within Europe within 25 minutes. But UKBA has lost more than 3,500 staff as a result of budget cuts while Heathrow alone dealt with a record 69 million passengers last year.

A BAA spokesman reiterated on Monday that waiting times at Heathrow had been unacceptable and that they had called on officials to address the problem as a matter of urgency. In a statement, BAA said: “There isn’t a trade-off between strong border security and a good passenger experience – Border Force should be delivering both.”

One Olympic official complained recently that he was made to queue for three hours at Heathrow immigration control.

The home secretary split the UK Border Agency in the wake of the Brodie Clark affair, creating a separate UK Border Force with its own law enforcement ethos.

Incoming search terms:

• willie walsh border control
• do job center check passport control
• scrap risk based approach passport theresa may
• uk border force heathrow iris