Baroness Hoey
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Immigration Queues (UK Airports)
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(12 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Damian Green
If the rules can be relaxed for anyone, Mr Speaker, they should be relaxed for my right hon. Friend. I take the importance of what he says. It is of course annoying not just for British business men coming back, but for foreign business people who also want as smooth a procedure as possible. That is why we worked so hard to introduce the e-passport gates. With every year that passes, 10% more British people get a new modern passport that enables them to use those gates, which can often provide a considerable improvement in itself. This debate is bedevilled by anecdote, with everyone having an individual story to tell, either good or bad. My own is that I came through Heathrow last Thursday and used the e-gates. I am happy to say that from arriving in the immigration hall to leaving took precisely four minutes.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
Does the Minister understand that British subjects and British passport holders are not really interested in targets, but in getting back into their own country as quickly as possible? Will he now answer the question asked by one of his hon. Friends? Why can we not simply say to the European Union that we are going to give priority to our British passport holders, who are going to have a separate queuing lane so that they can join it and get in first? Surely that is what we should be doing as an independent country.
Damian Green
As the hon. Lady knows perfectly well, that would require significant changes to the law going way beyond immigration policy. I gently suggest to her that all her constituents who want to go on holiday to other countries in the European Union would feel slightly short-changed if they had to wait much longer because there was a separate lane there, too.