The home secretary has secured a deal extending Britain's borders to the Eurostar terminal in Belgium.

The move will give immigration officers full powers in the country, allowing them to refuse entry to the Eurostar to any passengers with false or stolen travel documents, preventing them from travelling to the UK and claiming asylum.

Such an agreement has existed with France since 2001, which has reduced asylum applications at London Waterloo station by more than 90 per cent.

In the last year alone 9,000 people have been stopped at the three French Eurostar terminals.

"It's about getting ahead of the game," said David Roberts, director of border control at the Immigration Service.

"We don't want this to turn into a problem and by being there in Brussels it won't turn into a problem.

"People's behaviour will change.  We have to watch where the risks [of illegal immigration] are and those risks do change.

"There is no evidence at all that what we've done at Calais has displaced hundreds and hundreds of people to other ports in the UK but we've got to be alert for that and we've got to watch the risks carefully."

Details

David Blunkett finalised details on Thursday with his Belgian counterpart, Patrick Dewael.

"All of this adds up to a further reinforcement of the border controls, the restrictions, the ability to pick up people who shouldn't be coming across the border at all," he said.

"There is still a lot to do," he added.

"This is another announcement of working with the French, the Belgians and in future the Dutch so that we can move our border controls on to the European continent and stop people claiming asylum."

The new measures will be implemented in the summer.

While immigration officials have already been working in Brussels, their role has only been advisory.

"For a little while we have been exporting our frontier controls to where they are most needed," added Roberts.

"In 2001 there were many hundreds of people getting on the Eurostar without proper documents and when they were dealt with by immigration officials on the train or at Waterloo they claimed asylum.

"We have reduced that by about 95 per cent.  In one month in 2001 there were some 600 or 700 people who did it and last month I think there was one, and normally there is none.

"Its a real success story and we want to extend that to Eurostar coming from Brussels."