Travellers arriving at Heathrow Airport are currently being forced to queue up to six hours due to coronavirus checks at the border, an exasperated airport executive has claimed.
Chris Garton, the chief solutions officer for the London airport, told MPs ‘the situation is becoming untenable’, with wait times in recent days being ‘well in excess of two hours and up to six hours’.
Giving evidence to the Commons Transport Select Committee, he warned: ‘We’re starting to see disruption in some of the arriving passengers. If you’re made to queue for two or three hours, it’s not something you want to do, and we’re even having to involve the police service to help us.’
Mr Garton went on: ‘What’s happened is a whole host of new checks – 100 per cent checking of everybody – has been introduced, and that obviously has put a tremendous burden on the officers who work at the border. The Home Office has not provided them with additional officers.’
Around 800 border staff are working at Heathrow and that all are currently in work subject to the normal reasons for absence, according to the Immigration Services Union (ISU).
Lucy Moreton, from the ISU, said: “If they don’t digitise the e-gates and they still require us to do 100 per cent checks, then yes the queues could potentially at busy times become even worse than they are now.
“Six or seven hours is not impossible.”
Travellers often arrived at the airport without the right documentation and that pre-pandemic a non-contentious entry for someone with the right of residence would have been two minutes if they did not use the eGates.
Post-pandemic with the right paperwork, that transaction time is five minutes, the ISU representative alleged – and that without the right paperwork that time shoots up to at least 30 minutes.
Images: Twitter @maccagezer
Ms Moreton said: ‘The Government can choose two routes. Either remove the requirement for 100 per cent checks, with all the attendant risk to national Covid security. Or compel carriers to ensure that no one arrives in the UK without having complied with the relevant requirements.’
Mr Garton said the ‘solution’ is to enable passengers to ensure their entry to the UK is ‘assured’ before they begin their journey. Errors on passenger locator forms should be spotted and corrected in advance, and eGates should be able to check the documents automatically, he told MPs.
This would allow arriving travellers to ‘flow as you would normally through the eGates rather than having to line up and present your paperwork to a rather overstretched border official’, Mr Garton added.
The passenger was seen laying on the floor at the border control gate with a member of staff at her aid, as Covid checks created massive queues to get into the UK.
Footage posted online on Monday afternoon shows the collapsed woman being tended to by staff – as many more passengers wait to be cleared through the border.
The person who recorded the ordeal claims the passenger had collapsed following a seven-hour wait for entry clearance.
It is understood that the woman was in a 90 minute argument with Border Force officials before she collapsed.
The individual did not have the appropriate paperwork for hotel quarantine, the airport said.
