Airport e-gates keep rejecting my passport

Q I am a British citizen living in Portugal and for some reason my old passport wasn’t being accepted at airport e-gates when entering the UK. I have since renewed my passport but the problem persists.

Immigration officers merely ask where I am travelling from as they put my passport in a scanner. When I ask why I have been rejected by the e-gates, I am either told the manual scanners have different software to the e-gates, or that it is because I have a common surname. When I phoned the Passport Office to discuss the problem, an officer said that perhaps I should consider changing my name! Please can you help me get some answers?

– David Clark

A If the reason is simply that you have a common name, then surely there would be thousands of John Smiths and Peter Joneses with similar complaints. The ePassport gates work in part by using facial recognition technology to compare the faces of passengers to the images held on their biometric ePassports. Additional biographical and security checks are also conducted by Border Force officers using monitors behind the scenes. This explains why it sometimes takes longer to pass through the gates. You can also be rejected if you have grown facial hair, lost or gained a lot of weight or now wear glasses.

I contacted the Home Office on your behalf and was told it would not discuss individual cases for security reasons. I then asked you to put in a Freedom of Information request to see if we could find out more.

This proved equally frustrating. The Border Force’s Information Rights Team simply said there are a number of “technical and security reasons” why your passport wasn’t accepted and it couldn’t be more specific as disclosure might prejudice law enforcement.

In an age when I can open my iPhone using facial recognition while wearing sunglasses and a hat, surely it shouldn’t be beyond the scope of the Border Force’s IT system to flag up the fact that you are good to enter the UK, having been checked manually on a previous visit.

You are not alone. A poll of my friends uncovered three men who have similar issues. One had been told, unofficially, that he shared a name with someone on a “watch list”.

The Border Force’s IT system clearly isn’t fit for purpose. In February, David Neal, Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, published a withering report after a re-inspection of ePassport gates at three UK airports. He found that the latest IT upgrade had resulted in “poor management of Home Office records”, resulting in even more passengers being referred due to “inaccurate historical data not being cleansed from records”.

iWhat’s in a name? Officials claim that having a common surname can lead to e-gate issues but software problems may also be to blame