Lord knows Heathrow airport is usually a pretty hellish place even on its better days (another reason, incidentally, for starting again on the Thames Estuary and building houses for 150,000 people at Heathrow) but, at the risk of seeming simple this stramash over lengthy queues at LHR’s immigration seems laughably simple to resolve: deploy more Border Agency officers to check passports or, if you prefer, check only a random sample of passengers. Either will do, both will prevent people – especially those from outwith the EU – from spending hours for the joy of entering a country enduring, with no more than the usual level of grumbling, the wettest, coldest drought in recorded western european history.
Instead, however, we have ministers making pointless “fact-finding” trips to Heathrow and everyone insisting that it’s “more complicated” than simply hiring more staff. Perhaps it is. But it cannot take any great expertise, far less require a “new central control room” to “mobilise teams of border staff at terminals where queues may be beginning to build up” to solve this problem. Simply checking the timetable and provenance of flights might be enough to alert even the dimmer-witted brand of manager to the possibility that some times of the day might be more busy than others. Objectively-speaking, as the comrades used to say, chaos is good news for the unions and useful in as much as it embarasses the government. So there’s no incentive to make it work, there.
Is it about money? Maybe it is though the Border Agency – presumably established at extravagant cost – has an annual budget of more than £2.2bn and this might be thought sufficient to employ sufficient staff to check passports (if you decide you want to check more passports, of course).
The obvious solution, of course, is to privatise the Agency’s airport passport-checking services. It is hard to imagine that Tesco or Sainsbury’s or even, god help us, Morrison’s could not do a better job, presuming, that is, government officials had the wit to write a proper contract to enforce performance. And if Tesco or whoever failed? Well at least the job could be offered to someone else.
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