Electronic Passport Control Systems

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to improve the reliability of their electronic passport control systems.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Migration and Borders (Lord Murray of Blidworth) (Con)]

The UK border has a highly resilient e-gate infrastructure, with over 50% of all arrivals successfully using automation in the year ending March 2023. On Friday 26 May we had a nationwide border system issue, the unintended consequence of a change, which meant that we had to take our e-gates offline. We are undertaking a full review of the incident and are fully committed to ensuring that resilience is at the heart of our transformation of the border.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for that explanation. When you are standing for many hours at an e-gate, resilient is not the adjective I would use, but at least the Home Office issued a press release the next day, saying that it had put in place “robust plans” to deploy officers. That is useful. Is it not time that we had a contingency plan for e-gates, three years after the Government vowed to take back control of our Brexit borders, rather than relying on the odd person to check your passport manually? Is it not more important to do that than to see the Prime Minister flying off to Dover, putting on a life jacket, standing in a dinghy and pretending he is King Canute to keep a few illegal immigrants out?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

As the noble Lord well knows, 95.9% of recorded wait times in the first three months of 2023 were within published service standard. The UK border system has, as I have already said, a highly resilient e-gate infrastructure, with circa 65 million passengers being processed in the year to May 2023. There are currently 288 e-gates operational, comprising 22 at air and rail terminals, including in Paris, at Gare du Nord, and Brussels, at Gare du Midi. From April 2011 to June 2021, e-gates processed 258 million passengers through the UK border. As the noble Lord will see, it is a highly effective addition to our UK border infrastructure.