Is Heathrow on the flight path to collapse?

After a summer of chaos at the country’s busiest airport, a disillusioned employee who has worked there for almost three decades says he has never seen it in so much trouble

Atypical day for a passenger travelling through Heathrow might look something like this: after paying extortionate prices for flights, which in many cases have doubled in a year, you will enter the terminal building to be greeted by a demoralised young employee.

This worker will be on close to minimum wage and been waiting to move airside, but can’t owing to a backlog of reference clearance.

It used to be done in house and turned around within weeks but now has been outsourced to external firms meaning anything up to a six-month wait.

The worker will direct you to a bag drop machine which, if actually working, could demand £65 for that one kilo extra. Heaven help you if English is not your first language and good luck trying to find anyone to help. Once that hurdle has been overcome, a two-hour security queue awaits. If your flight is operating, be prepared for possibly not having your bag for the entirety of your holiday. A lack of confidence in luggage retrieval has resulted in a major increase of hand baggage being taken to the gate.

This can then delay departure, with passengers taking longer to board and baggage needing to be moved from overhead lockers into the hold because there is not enough space.

If your flight has been cancelled or you have missed a connection, then expect anything up to a six-hour queue at flight connections, resulting in further dangerous bottlenecks at security.

Once you are lucky enough to reach the front of the rebooking queue, a BA agent could be ringing a third person sitting either at home or in Delhi.

Before Covid, I could have helped you rebook your flight in minutes, but post-pandemic there is no longer a ticket desk at the airport, meaning passengers who rebook these days can expect to be sent to Manchester via Munich and such like. The outsourcing was supposed to save money – but now appears to be costing the airline millions in compensation for delays, hotels for the night and extra tickets.

BA’s solution is not to admit all the mistakes but to instead compound customers’ misery with its new queuing system. In some cases this involves taking a note of the passenger’s booking reference then asking them to leave the terminal where they must await a phone call from India regarding a rebooking – a take it or leave it option. What is not mentioned is that rebooking could be on a flight a fortnight later.

This is just a snapshot of life at Heathrow, where I have worked for nearly 30 years. I have never seen the airport in so much trouble and that’s why it was announced earlier this week that the passenger cap has now been extended to October.

There are staff from three different organisations involved in this: Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL), British Airways (BA) and UK Border.

Employees of HAL and BA were offered new contracts for less money, which they interpreted as a cynical fire and rehire strategy rather than bosses offering employees a temporary pay cut for a temporary virus.

None of them are happy and many staff are thousands of pounds down on their pre-pandemic pay which has damaged their work ethic, resulting in lengthy queues.

UK Border staff are similarly disillusioned and demoralised owing to staff shortages and Brexit changes. They feel they are overworked and underpaid which again means long queues when entering the UK.

Within many uniformed departments of BA, the entire machine is broken, owing to apparently bad business decisions. It is estimated that more than 40 per cent of staff have lost thousands of pounds.

Add inflation and some are as much as 30 per cent down on pre-Covid. Only old contract uniform staff have lost money while much of the management pay remains untouched.

New staff have been given a pay rise to seemingly enforce “divide and conquer” tactics within both organisations, which hasn’t helped morale among long-serving staff.

In addition to the pay issue, rosters which were not tampered with for decades have been turned upside down, often meaning longer shifts.

Some staff now alternate between working earlies and lates which means you lose half a day either side with zero work-life balance.

This results in staff being constantly exhausted as well as angry.

The EU tap of cheap labour has evaporated, so the current workforce is here to stay and only willing to do the bare minimum after feeling completely let down by management.

Some of the staff who left BA and were naive enough to return on a fraction of their previous wage have taken a sharp U-turn once they realise what they have signed up for.

Management are generally regarded as inept.

As told to Camilla Tominey