Report slams border chaos as workers strike
HEATHROW Airport managed to avoid unusually long queues at immigration yesterday in spite of strike action by border guards.
The biggest queue recorded by owner BAA was a whopping one hour and 42 minutes long – more than twice the Home Office’s target, but currently par for the course at the poorly-staffed border.
Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers went on strike yesterday, the third such walkout in a year-long dispute over pension cuts.
But all eyes were on Britain’s busiest airport, following a damning report that blamed a 15 per cent cut in staffing, poor organisation and a lack of training for the sprawling queues and lax checks at Heathrow immigration control.
John Vine, chief inspector of borders and immigration, said “resources were not matched to demand, management oversight and assurance was lacking in many areas and staff were not always properly trained” at Heathrow.
He said the number of refusals at the border fell 21 per cent last year, made worse by staffing cuts and new technology such as biometric gates.
Vine’s inspections last year threw up serious breaches of immigration guidelines, which he reported to the Border Agency – leading to Theresa May’s probe into border controls in February and the subsequent departure of Border Force chief Brodie Clark.
But yesterday, the government insisted that border controls were working properly.
Immigration minister Damian Green said Vine’s research was already out of date as practices had already changed since the Border Agency split.
And on yesterday’s strikes, the cabinet office said it had “deploy[ed] staff to manage peak arrivals during the day”.
Cabinet minister Francis Maude said the strike was futile: “Pension talks will not be reopened and nothing further will be achieved.”
Border staff were joined by civil servants, prison workers and NHS staff in walk-outs and other protests across the country yesterday.