Thousands of foreign criminals 'at large in Britain' as inquiry exposes failures in police and customs checks

Poor border controls and inadequate police checks are making Britain vulnerable to foreign criminals, according to an official report.

Customs officials and police are investigating the backgrounds of only small numbers of arrivals and suspects, the study found.

Just 27 a day are checked to see if they have a criminal past.

And the identities of only 600 travellers a year are checked against an Interpol database of stolen passports.

French officials make 7.4million such checks, while those in Switzerland carry out 3.6million.

Illegally entering or overstaying a visa is also rarely recorded on the Police National Computer.

The report into the national and international use of criminal records was drawn up by former Whitehall mandarin Sir Ian Magee.

He said: 'Front line staff involved in public protection often lack awareness and understanding about international exchange of criminality information. Many police officers simply do not know what is available.'

The report found that the arrival of 2.5million foreigners a month 'was not always accompanied by a flow of information about criminal activities in different countries'.

It said: 'Information needs to be shared between countries. However, the number of combined requests to Interpol and the UK Central Authority for the Exchange of Criminal Records is very low.'

The report said the UK Border Agency does not yet have an automatic link to Interpol's lost and stolen documents database.

Officials are also unable to access alerts on data from across the EU for wanted and missing persons, stolen and missing property or arrest warrants.

'From the perspective of public protection, this is unsatisfactory,' Sir Ian said.

He refused however to put a figure on the number of foreign criminals who may have slipped into the UK because of the official failings.

Last night, Dominic Grieve, Tory shadow Home Secretary, said: 'It is disgraceful that the Government takes the security and safety of people in this country so lightly.

'It is bad enough our porous borders and inadequate IT systems, along with serial Government incompetence, allow undesirable people to come into this country so easily and go undetected.

'It beggars belief we are not even using what tools we do have to try to combat the threat these pose.'

Former Home Secretary John Reid asked Sir Ian to draw up his independent report following the revelation that data on 27,000 Britons who had offended abroad was not logged in the UK.

Sir Ian also found that nine of the 31 recommendations made after an official inquiry into the Soham murders remain unimplemented four years on.

'The delay in full implementation means that we are still living with at least some of the risk,' he concluded in his 150-page Review of Criminality Information.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said yesterday that the Government had made great strides in collecting and using information about criminals.

But she added: 'There is more to do and I am committed to pressing forward with further improvements.

'We will immediately press ahead with work to improve access to overseas criminal history information to help deport foreign nationals who break our laws.'

Interpol chief Ronald Noble warned last year that Britain does not routinely check newcomers against his agency's list of 11,000 terror suspects.