Homeward Bound: The Incredibly Long Immigration Queue

By Shona Harris

With what promises to be one of the wettest summers in living memory ahead of us, the annual school break provides a welcome excuse to pack up and head for warmer, and hopefully dryer, climes.

While there have always been hurdles to jump during the outward bound part of one’s travels in the form of visas, airport taxes and ever tighter security measures, generally speaking, getting back into the UK through passport control has always been a fairly swift, painless procedure for UK passport holders. The only real worry of returning home was making sure you didn’t exceed the duty-free allowance.

Sadly, one of the effects of current global unrest is the need to tighten border security and this has contributed to the creation of a new agency to provide this security. Their recent press release explains their rasion d’etre:

"The newly created Border and Immigration Agency (BIA) is a new executive agency of the Home Office. The Agency assumes the responsibilities of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) for managing immigration control in the UK.

The Border & Immigration Agency is responsible for strengthening the country’s borders to further enhance the security of the United Kingdom. Increased use of biometrics - which help ensure that we know the identity of people travelling to this country – is a central part of how we meet that responsibility.

Border and Immigration Agency Immigration Officers examine the documents of those who seek entry to the country at passport control. While allowing most passengers into the UK quickly, thorough and robust checks are essential to protect our national security, to identify those who present a risk to the public and to impact on illegal immigration. In support of this, the Agency has rolled out new passport scanning technology enabling frontline staff at all ports to check the biometrics contained within chips in travel documents against the passengers presenting them.

The Border & Immigration Agency also plays a leading role with other countries to set standards for biometrics in travel documents to ensure that different countries are using similar technology.

As well as enhancing the security of the document and making it harder to forge and use fraudulently, the issuing of biometric passports has allowed the UK to remain part of the US visa waiver program and leaving UK citizens free, in the majority of cases, from being required to have a visa to travel to the US.

The Iris Recognition Immigration System (IRIS) is another innovation developed by the Border & immigration Agency to ensure passengers can enter the country in a speedy and secure way. IRIS is a quick and efficient system which uses IRIS recognition of passengers who have voluntarily provided their biometrics to enable them to pass swiftly through immigration control. For more information on IRIS visit the IRIS pages.

Additionally, we are progressively rolling-out a programme whereby everyone who requires a visa to come to the UK will, at time of application, also be required to provide their fingerprints and have their photograph taken. This enables additional checks to be undertaken resulting in greater certainty over an individual’s eligibility to travel to this country."

All of which is the right and proper response required to help detain or deter the tiny minority that resolutely try to disrupt the lives of the majority. Unfortunately, as often is the case in the UK, the agency appears to be underfunded and where the new technology has been introduced, it has doubled the time it takes UK passport holders to get back into the country.

However, this summer it really only affects those travelling into Stansted and Luton as there is currently no definite schedule to introduce this machinery to Gatwick or Heathrow, though it will happen in due course.

The technology has been designed to improve passport security and tighten immigration controls on all arrivals including UK and EU citizens. But even without it passengers have complained of waiting more than an hour to clear immigration when returning to Britain and at Stansted, where this technology is up and running, queues have been at bursting point.

BAA which runs the leading airports has spent more than £20 million, recruited an additional 1,400 security staff and introduced 21 additional checkpoints, but all this is designed to smooth and speed up the outgoing process, it is not their job to provide a quick and easy ingress for passengers returning into the country and perhaps the Home Office needs to make similar investments in the BIA.

The reason the new equipment takes so much longer is that under the previous system, airport officials simply swiped passports through a scanner which quickly read a series of encoded letters and numbers, now they have to use equipment built for the new generation of biometric passports with security holograms and computer-embedded data – introduced to make forgeries more difficult. Older passports are still swiped as they were before, but in some cases additional information is tapped into a computer to further verify the passengers' dentity.

John Tincey, the Vice Chairman of the Immigration Service Union predicts chaos this summer due to the extra time these passports take to be scanned. He said: "It used to take between three to four seconds to process a passenger, now you’re looking at eight to 10 seconds so it has more than doubled and at busy times this makes the situation impossible. Stansted is growing very quickly," he went on "our staff were struggling to keep up even before the regime changed. Gatwick, Luton and Birmingham have also been badly hit because of the growth in low-cost airlines and they are all due to get this equipment soon."

Allegedly on one occasion recently, police threatened to prosecute immigration officials for public order offences because of the overcrowding.

Perhaps understandably, the BIA remains unrepentant. Said a spokesman "We make no apology. The number of border control staff is at an all-time high. New biometric technology is being rolled out so trusted travellers can pass through border control more quickly. But thorough checks are necessary to turn away criminals, prevent illegal immigration and protect the public."

It’s not that BIA haven’t provided enough staff but as yet they have not made realistic allowances for the unexpected, like when flight arrivals vary from their schedules causing large build ups of passengers at immigration controls.

Hopefully though, these teething problems will have been properly addressed by the time it arrives at Gatwick and Heathrow. Until then, avoid Stansted if at all possible and make sure your passport is not due to expire halfway through your holiday or getting back into UK really could really put the dampener on this year’s trips abroad.

 

The BIA's website can be found at: www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk