Mr President, I too would like to support the substance of the German Council initiative to improve on the exchange of information on counterfeit travel documents and to strengthen the security of the European Union's borders both for Member States such as my own, the United Kingdom, which are outside of Schengen as well as those that are at the EU perimeter. Recently my country, the United Kingdom, has been subject to an enormous rise in the inward flow of peoples and in my previous job as a Central London hospital doctor I witnessed a significant degree of illegal immigration and fraudulent abuse of our generous asylum policy. We in the UK are currently witnessing something of the order of 7,000 new applicants for asylum every month and over 80% of these eventually turn out after investigation to be bogus. This represents some 100,000 people per year including their dependants coming into my country. I personally have come across a Nigerian asylum seeker being granted asylum on the strength of a false Liberian passport, an Albanian family who passed themselves off as Kosovans, another Nigerian who had loaned his British passport to his cousin who was able to enter the United Kingdom under the identity of his cousin and then commit a crime, and an Algerian who was living under the identity of a French citizen and who had bought his ID card on the Parisian black market. These are just some of the many abuses of which I have personal experience and we know that for the immigration authorities these examples are a daily occurrence. How can we expect our own immigration and police authorities to be able to crack down on the systematic abuse of our system? We have a duty to remember that this constant flow of illegal immigration is posing an enormous burden, in particular in inner cities, on our national health service, social services and social security system as well as putting huge pressure on our limited housing stock. Unfortunately, there is evidence that large numbers of asylum-seekers have been waved through Continental Europe with a suggestion that they head towards our Channel ports in the knowledge that we have a permissive policy with instant rights to housing and social security benefits. Although the British Conservative Party is formally opposed in principle to commissioning under Article 63 of the Treaty of Amsterdam to the first pillar of policies on visas, immigration and asylum – and I therefore have to disagree with our rapporteur on this issue – nevertheless we welcome intergovernmental cooperation under the third pillar through Council joint action on the exchange of such information, including that relating to forged travel documents in order to crack-down on crime, particularly international crime which respects no national boundaries. There is evidence that organised crime has spotted a soft and lucrative target in the illegal traffic of human beings who are often prepared to spend their life savings to gain entry to wealthy western countries in the hope of making a new life for themselves. This initiative is, therefore, in my view, a step in the right direction with the use of modern computer image digitalising technology to aid law enforcement agencies and interior ministries to cooperate throughout the Union. It is a good example in my view of the sort of European Union venture that my party in the United Kingdom can support so long as it is done on a flexible, intergovernmental basis.

Political group: PPE-DE