Heathrow's long queues condemned in report

Long queues at the UK's busiest airport have been caused by a lack of effective planning amid job cuts, with border staff signing off at the start of busy periods, inspectors said today.

Limited resources are not being matched to the demand at London's Heathrow Airport, damaging the ability of border staff to maintain effective and efficient controls, the chief inspector of borders and immigration John Vine said.

The introduction of a series of significant changes "was simply far too much organisational change during the busiest time of the year", inspectors warned.

The critical report on the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and the Border Force comes as Heathrow faces another shake-up as Home Secretary Theresa May responds to the ongoing row over queues which have seen passengers from outside the EU having to wait up to three hours.

The introduction of new team structures, rosters and shift patterns came as border staff numbers at Terminal 3 fell by 15% from 322 to 277 in the 12 months to last August, inspectors said.

The new team-based working, designed to ensure staff work in the same teams each day, brought a lack of flexibility, with low staffing numbers when passengers numbers were high and high staffing levels during quieter periods. Mr Vine said: "I found that recent organisational changes such as the introduction of team-based working, a new shift working system and the amalgamation of immigration and customs roles had suffered from a lack of effective planning.

"This was far too much organisational change during Heathrow's busiest time of the year. "I remain concerned that this lack of planning has affected the agency's ability to maintain an effective and efficient border control." The report found that queue targets for passengers from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) were breached 62 times between September 18 and 30 last year, with the longest wait hitting two hours and 15 minutes.

The inspectors raised serious concerns over the use of eGates, which use facial recognition technology, and called for the Border Force to investigate whether they provide adequate security.

Staff told inspectors they turned the tuning of the gates down as the automatic system refused too many passengers when turned up.

In one 15-minute period, two staff on desks processed 66 passengers while just 22 went through the two eGates.

"At all times when we carried out the comparison, the manual desks processed more passengers than the eGates," the inspectors said.

They also found that in twothirds of cases, searches of passengers were "neither justified nor proportionate or in line with legislation and agency guidance".

There were "significant failings ... identical to the problems we identified during our inspection at Gatwick North", the inspectors said.

Both reports found that some passengers were arrested despite officers finding no illicit goods during searches.

Immigration Minister Damian Green said: "This report covers the period before the Border Force was split from the UK Border Agency and since then we have taken action to tackle these issues.

"A culture change is under way to make Border Force an organisation that effectively tackles illegal immigration, protects the UK from terrorism and detects crimes like drug trafficking and weapon smuggling."