There are lots of signs at Gatwick about how it is unacceptable to be ‘rude or abusive’ to Border Force staff. One poster warns that losing your temper or gesticulating in a threatening manner could be a criminal offence. Keep a lid on it, is the-message.
My wife Joanna and I recently had plenty of time to study these missives and just about kept a lid on it after returning from a weekend in Spain. It was a Monday evening that became a Monday night at Gatwick’s north terminal as thousands of travellers snaked back and forth for nearly an hour at passport control in an atmosphere that swung from anger to sheer astonishment at the incompetence of the government agency that mans the UK border at British airports.
‘You do wonder why one bothers to go on holiday at all when you come back to this,’ said Joanna, which seemed a little extreme given the lovely few days we had just enjoyed in Andalucia. But that was tame compared with the hissed comments from passengers last month at Stansted — also on a Monday — where an estimated 5,000 people waited interminably to show their passports to a human being or stare blankly at a camera in the Orwellian e-gates area.
Children were crying, grown-ups were spitting with rage. Stansted officials — distancing themselves from the chaos — offered an apology and blamed Border Force, while Border Force’s apologists naturally blamed the agency’s lack of adequate resources.
A report by the National Audit Office confirms that spending on Border Force dropped from £616 million in 2012 to £525 million last year, at a time when record numbers — some 250 million people — pass through our airports annually. But surely it can’t require too much nous to make sure there are enough staff at any given time to cope with the numbers? It’s not as if a whole fleet of aircraft suddenly lands at an airport without warning.
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