Strengthening our borders
This page explains our strategic approach to strengthening our border controls, making legitimate travel easier but preventing those who might cause us harm from travelling to the United Kingdom.
The growth in people movement across the globe demands a new approach to managing our borders. Our aim is to create a new offshore line of defence, using new biometric technology to check individuals before they depart on their journey.
By the use of controls prior to, and at the point of arrival, we can count passengers into the country. Using similar controls on exit, we can also count people out.
Recently we signed our contract with Trusted Borders, a technology provider who will work with us to deliver our e-borders programme - developing a system to track people in and out of the country. We also started scanning every passport of every passenger entering the United Kingdom and successfully rolled out biometric visas at our overseas border, so that all visa applicants will be fingerprinted by the end of March 2008.