Our broken immigration and justice systems allowed Shamima Begum to become the terrorist she now is

How did three unaccompanied teenage girls board a plane to Turkey? Because we do not have effective border checks at our ports and airports

Sajid Javid is dominating headlines with his controversial decision to strip the teenage Isis runaway Shamima Begum of her British citizenship. Yet nobody in government, let alone the home secretary whose very job it is, is talking about the underlying root cause of this latest immigration crisis.

How did three unaccompanied teenage girls board a plane to Turkey in 2015 without the alarm being raised? The simple answer is that we didn’t, and still don’t, have effective exit checks at our ports and airports. The airline the girls used to travel to Turkey didn’t step in because they didn’t realise anything was amiss.

Paper-based checks for flights to EU destinations were dropped by the Conservatives in 1994 and by Labour for other locations in 1997. The coalition government reintroduced them for some destinations in 2015, but an inspection report concluded that the new system had been “severely hamstrung” by a failure to collect accurate data. The report also identified 200,000 people who had left the UK where there was no record of them entering the country in the first place.

The system relies on data provided by passengers at the time of booking, which is far less reliable than a full passport check. Shamima Begum used her sister’s, not her own, passport to travel and yet there was no system in place to pick that up because she was departing the country rather than entering it.

I travel all over the world on business; the UK is the only country where my passport isn’t checked physically by immigration officers before I board a plane to leave. And when we leave Argentina, after visiting my wife’s family, we even have to show our children’s birth certificates to prove we aren’t smuggling them out of the country. No such checks on my children are made at home.

The Irish government has shown how effective immigration checks can help stop terrorists. New technology has been introduced at Dublin airport which enables immigration officers to carry out instant checks of passport and travel documents against an Interpol database. Within the first week, 17 individuals of interest were identified – including one person who was travelling on a stolen passport.

Britain makes no such efforts. Meanwhile, a no-deal Brexit could also further restrict the ability of immigration officials to identify terrorists if it means the UK is locked out of EU security databases, as some MPs fear.

The other searching question raised by the case of Shamima Begum, which needs immediate answers from the Home Office, is why the much-lauded Prevent strategy did not identify Begum as a risk before she was radicalised. According to official figures, for 42 per cent of the 7,300 people to the programme in 2017-18, no further action was taken. Prevent is clearly not working – and that is not the only part of the counter-terror and justice programme that is failing.

Increasing radicalisation inside prisons is, rightly, being considered a priority issue by the Home Office. Given that, it is surely vital that those released after serving prison sentences for terror offences are very closely monitored as they integrate back into British society, as well as those serving more minor sentences but who could have come into contact with radical ideas while incarcerated. Yet only this week we have seen three private probation services companies, which are responsible for monitoring former prisoners, go into administration, while another was exposed for under-reporting its case load.

There is a clear pattern here of the Home Office relying on others to do its job for it: airlines (lightly) policing our borders, school teachers reporting those who might be radicalised, and private companies managing those on probation. Shamima Begum’s case should be a wakeup call for Sajid Javid. Rather than just trying to win the hearts of middle England, lining himself up as the next Tory leader, it’s high time he fixed the broken Home Office.