INHUMANE
Travel bosses demand border crisis is fixed as they label 7-hour queues...
TRAVEL chiefs piled pressure on ministers last night to sort out the crisis at Britain’s borders in time for the restart of summer holidays abroad.
Bosses of Heathrow Airport, British Airways and Jet2 expressed dismay at ‘ inhumane and completely avoidable’ seven-hour queues.
They called on Home Secretary Priti Patel to boost border guard numbers as there are often ‘ hardly any desks manned’ at passport control.
The wider use of electronic passport gates would ensure hassle-free holidays once foreign travel resumes under the Government’s ‘traffic light’ system, the experts said. The earliest date travel could resume is May 17.
It comes after a senior Heathrow official told MPs how more than half of arrivals are waiting two or three hours at the border, with some queuing for seven hours. One woman collapsed at a Heathto row passport control desk after waiting up to seven hours for her paperwork to be checked, it emerged yesterday.
She reportedly fell after being told she would have to quarantine in a hotel for 11 nights at a cost of £1,750 because she had been in a red list country. It meant the woman was mixing for hours in the queue with passengers from other lowerrisk countries. Footage of the incident was posted online.
Arrivals are a fraction of what they were pre-pandemic and travel bosses fear queues could exceed even current waiting times as the ban on foreign holidays is lifted.
Sean Doyle, head of BA, said it had been working hard to ensure it can welcome customers safely but public confidence would be undermined ‘if we are not fully prepared at entry points into the UK’.
Heathrow Airport boss John Holland- Kaye said: ‘ Recently, passengers arriving in this country have faced waiting times of over six hours with hardly any desks manned. This is inhumane and completely avoidable.
‘ This is a wake- up call for ministers to make sure that when international travel restarts, the processes at the border are automated and every desk is manned.’
Waiting times have increased because of the need to thoroughly vet every travellers’ Covid paperwork, including passenger locator forms – which they fill in with contact details and information on where they’re staying – and proof of a negative test.
In a report published last week, the Government’s global travel taskforce pledged to ‘develop automatic validation’ of the form process so borders could flow smoothly this summer. The forms must be filled out by every passenger online before boarding a UK-bound plane, train or ship.
The report said Border Force could then make wider use of egates at the largest airports by summer. But travel chiefs fear this timeline is not ambitious enough.
Karen Dee, of the Airport Operators Association, said: ‘Border Force’s record of failure to deliver digitisation on time does not fill us with confidence this will be achievable.’ And Steve Heapy, head of package holiday giant Jet2, said: ‘Border Force needs to gear up for this... there’s a lot of work to do. But there’s still no meat on the bones as to how these things are going to work.’
But Border Force insiders said they are already working at ‘full pelt’. Queues are down to the ‘laborious’ checks to ensure travellers are not breaching Covid rules designed to stop mutant strains entering the UK, they said.
All arrivals, including British citizens who would normally go straight to the electronic border gates, must be spoken to by immigration officers to check they have not been through a red list country. If officers are satisfied the travellers are telling the truth, they are allowed to use the e-gates. If they discover an issue, such as someone failing to book two Covid tests in advance, the paperwork can take half an hour to complete.
‘The checks carried out at the border are incredibly labour-intensive and much more time- consuming than normal,’ said one frontline source.
The Home Office said: ‘Queues and wait times will be longer as it is vital that we undertake thorough checks at the border.’