Damian Green MP

Former head of the UK Border Force Brodie Clark has warned that there are risks in drafting in extra staff to cover border controls at airports.

Speaking on the World at One on BBC Radio 4 after ministers announced 80 additional staff, Mr Clark said: "I understand that the plan is to pull staff in from other Government departments to cover some of this work with a truncated training course. There are some risks in respect of their aptitude and their testing for this type of work. I think there are plans to pool retired people in and I think that's a very sensible thing to do, and I think there are plans to pool and redeploy staff from other areas of Border Force work. I personally think that's very risky.

"I think our concern and focus should equally be on weaponry, explosives, Class A drugs and things like that coming into the country as well as some of the lower level risk issues in the people business."

Asked whether other areas could be left vulnerable by moving staff, Mr Clark said: "I think that is a very, very important and serious risk. I think there has been a tendency to take staff from customs work and use them in front-line desk work on immigration activity. I do think that creates other holes in parts of the security business.

Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, criticised "drafting in staff from other areas of an already overstretched agency".

It is also reported that nearly 600 civil servants and former immigration workers are to be drafted in to help staff Britain's borders during the Olympics.

The UK will make “no compromises” on its border security, the Immigration Minister will say later today. In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute, Damian Green will also say the e-borders programme will be “genuinely secure, fluid and complete”.

Meanwhile a Conservative MP has hit out at plans to allow all European Union nations to access the UK's DNA bank. Dominic Raab told the Daily Mail the move could mean Britons "risk finding themselves mistakenly dragged into criminal investigations abroad".

Non-EU migrants may have a significantly greater negative effect on the employment of UK-born workers, according to experts.

However, the Migration Advisory Committee's report also found no link between immigration from EU countries and loss of jobs for British workers. The MAC's research found that the arrival of 100 non-EU migrants could lead to 23 fewer British residents in work.

At the same time, the chair of MAC, Professor David Metcalf, stressed that there was no proven causation between the arrival of immigrants and higher unemployment. He referred instead to an "association". Furthermore, he underlined that for immigrants who stayed in the country for more than five years there was no link at all.

Immigration Minister Damian Green said: "Controlled immigration can bring benefits to the UK, but uncontrolled immigration can put pressure on public services, on infrastructure and on community relations. This report makes clear that it can also put pressure on the local labour market."

The MAC's claim contradicts a report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research which said there was "no association between migrant inflows and claimant unemployment". The pressure group Migration Watch UK claimed it would be a "remarkable coincidence" if there was no link.