A nationwide technical issue with e-gates at ports and airports in the UK has caused long queues and scenes of chaos at the UK border. The e-gates stopped working on Friday, and all passengers had to be processed through staffed airport desks. The Home Office stated that the issue had been resolved on Saturday evening, but Paul Charles, a travel expert at the PC Agency, warned Sky News that the underinvestment in the UK’s transport infrastructure had left these systems “hanging by a thread”.
Manual Checking of Passports
The failure of e-gates at the UK’s airports means that the manual checking of passports by UK Border Force staff has become necessary. Given the huge volume of passengers, staff will be under pressure to work “very quickly” to try to keep the queues down. This could, according to Charles, “pose dangers to national security” as staff may miss things that they would usually find in normal circumstances.
E-Gate System Requires More Investment
According to Charles, the e-gate system is “creaking at the seams” and requires more investment. He believes that millions of pounds need to be spent “making our systems and our borders much more secure”. The UK currently has over 270 e-gates at the border, which are available for use by British and EU citizens over the age of 12, as well as people from several other countries, including Australia, Canada, the US, Japan, and New Zealand.
Charles suggested that the busiest weekend since the end of 2019 for the number of arrivals and departures from the UK may have been too much for the e-gate system to handle. He warned that the system would fall over again and that the outage was a fundamental problem. Charles stated that the UK’s transport infrastructure had been underinvested in, leaving the systems “hanging by a thread”.
The failure of e-gates at the UK’s airports poses a danger to national security, warned a travel expert. The e-gates stopped working on Friday, causing long queues and chaos at the UK border. The manual checking of passports by UK Border Force staff has become necessary, and staff may miss things that they would usually find in normal circumstances, which could pose dangers to national security. The e-gate system requires more investment, and millions of pounds need to be spent “making our systems and our borders much more secure”. The UK currently has over 270 e-gates at the border and is available for use by British and EU citizens over the age of 12, as well as people from several other countries.
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