Guardian: Heathrow queues: what's a home secretary to do?

Andrew Watson · **Posted:** Tue, 01 May 2012 20:00:15 +0000

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012 ... sfeed=true

Heathrow queues: what's a home secretary to do?

Some claim it is 'the longest line ever known to mankind', others worry about the Olympics. How can the problem be fixed?

o Alan Travis, home affairs editor
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 15.36 BST

...

"It all goes back to Brodie Clark [the former head of the UK Border Force ousted amid claims that he relaxed border checks without ministerial authority] and the insistence of having full passport checks which everyone has to go through," said a Whitehall source.

"This is unsustainable. You simply can't do it. Once you say that everybody must have full passport checks, as the home secretary has done, then it becomes very difficult politically to row back from that."

The home secretary's political attachment to full 100% passport checks stems directly from her desire to burnish her reputation as tough on immigration following the forced departure of Clark, and his policy that the queues could only be managed by a "risk-based approach" to passport checks. The problem is that the system cannot cope – especially when Border Agency staffing numbers have to be cut by 18% or 5,000 fewer staff by 2015.

The curious thing about this "risk-based approach" is that the authorised pilot scheme that tested the ability to deal with rising passenger numbers at a time of fewer staff last summer at Heathrow was initially deemed a success by everyone – including the prime minister himself in the Commons. But history has since been rewritten.

The official view is that Clark's decisions to relax some of the 10 separate passport and visa checks passengers from outside Europe go through during their journey to Britain have clouded the results so much that the pilot is regarded as inconclusive.

...

Hopes that technology could provide the answer have been dashed by the regular breakdown of, first, the staff-free eye-scanning "iris-gates", which have now been withdrawn, and then by the delayed introduction of the cutting-edge fast-track "e-gates" that need a database of "trusted travellers" who are signed up for them to work. Staff have discouraged passengers from using the "e-gates".

...

There is one long-term solution that could do a lot to ease the situation. The Home Office has spent more than £800m on developing its "e-borders project". This ensures that all foreign nationals from outside Europe who require a visa to get into Britain have a "biometric" visa that includes an electronic fingerprint.

They are not even allowed to get on a plane to get to Britain without that electronic fingerprint being verified and the flight and personal details logged in Manchester so that the security checks can be carried out before they even get to the airport departure gate. The project – which was supposed to cover everyone travelling to and from Britain – has been scaled back since it became mired last summer in a legal fight with the original contractors. But if ministers were prepared to rely on those advanced passport checks for non-European passengers they could find a way through the Heathrow chaos.

Guest · **Posted:** Fri, 04 May 2012 06:41:57 +0000

But perhaps the biometric visa sustem is farcical :

From the Independent

Quote:

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/may-prepares-for-border-staff-strike-as-chaos-hits-heathrow-7712258.html

Meanwhile the UK Border Agency (UKBA) faced scathing criticism over the quality of its computer system.

An immigration lawyer, Andrew Tingley, claimed its IT system had collapsed under the volume of visa applications, forcing senior executives and foreign investors to consider taking their business elsewhere.

Andrew Tingley, a partner at Kingsley Napley, said it was "beyond farcical" that new rules requiring foreign nationals from outside the EU to have a biometric residents' permit had left the IT system unable to cope.

A UKBA spokeswoman said: "We are experiencing some IT problems in our Croydon public enquiry office which we are working to resolve."

NO2ID

Guardian: Heathrow queues: what's a home secretary to do?

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