§ The Minister for Citizenship and Immigration (Mr. Desmond Browne)The Government are firmly committed to maintaining effective immigration12WS controls while at the same time ensuring that genuine passengers are able to pass through our ports with the least possible inconvenience.
The number of people arriving at UK airports who are found to be inadmissible is unacceptably high. Certain nationals, who are required to hold a valid visa to enter the UK, may transit this country for up to 24 hours without a visa. This provides a relatively easy and inexpensive way for those who are intent on circumventing our immigration controls to do so. Last year we introduced measures to tackle this problem with the introduction of a direct airside transit visa (DATV) requirement for 23 nationalities. For the three months following the introduction on 16 October of DATV regimes for Angola, Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Lebanon and Pakistan, the number of asylum applications made at ports by those nationalities fell by 58 per cent. DATV requirements have been shown to work and we now need to take further action to strengthen the regime. Intelligence would suggest that some individuals travelling on Kenyan and Tanzanian documents to the United Kingdom are destroying these documents either en route or after gaining entry to the UK, and are then applying for asylum as Somalian nationals. Therefore from 00.01 hours on Thursday 13 May all nationals of Kenya and Tanzania wishing to transit the UK will require a visa to do so.
To avoid undue hardship for those who had already made their travel plans, we have agreed to operate a grace period. Until 23.59 hours on Wednesday 19 May, any transit passenger who bought their ticket on or before 12 May will not be refused entry solely on the basis of not holding a valid transit visa. Also, any person on the return leg of a journey they commenced before 13 May and who passed through the UK on the outward leg of their journey will be allowed to transit the UK without a visa until 23.59 on 9 June.
In parallel with those measures, we are introducing changes to the arrangements that allow certain groups of low risk passenger to be exempt from a transit visa requirement if they are in possession of specific documents. The exemption applying to those holding a valid visa for the United States of America or Canada has been widened to enable visa-free transit of the United Kingdom irrespective of the routing chosen to reach the USA or Canada. Similarly, a passenger returning from a trip to the USA or Canada will be able to transit the United Kingdom irrespective of the routing they choose providing they are in possession of an onward air ticket and they are not seeking to transit the UK more than six months since they last entered the USA or Canada with a valid visa.
We have also decided to introduce an exemption for holders of diplomatic or official passports issued by the Vietnamese Government, who will be exempt from the requirement to hold a visa when transiting the UK for up to 24 hours.