‘Five-hour queues’ at Heathrow airport following more e-gate chaos

‘I think I’ll stay home and stick to Zoom calls,’ tweets passenger

Arrivals at Heathrow airport this summer (REUTERS)

Passengers arriving at Heathrow were forced to wait in long queues on Wednesday or were held on planes due to a problem with self-service passport gates.

The airport has been plagued with incidents of slow-moving queues and delays at Border Control this year.

Most recently, an IT failure shut down its e-gates on 24 September and there were reports of people fainting in the queue during long waits over the August bank holiday weekend.

Heathrow has attributed the problems to the Border Force, which is run by the Home Office.

Last week an unnamed Border Force guard told The Daily Mail that the recurring problems with Border Control were due to a “nightmare” new rota system for guards, increasing working hours and causing some officers to quit their jobs or call in sick.

Passengers at Heathrow took to social media to complain.

“Absolute chaos at Heathrow immigration lines. Could be at least 5 hrs,” tweeted Rolando Estrada.

George Zarkadakis, an artificial intelligence engineer from London, wrote on Twitter: “System for scanning passports is down (again). Expected time of waiting for arriving passengers: 2-4 hours. I think I’ll stay home next time... and stick to Zoom calls.”

Aviation analyst Alex Macheras wrote: “Remember: every other major European hub airport is able to function normally, but Heathrow – in October 2021 – is STILL struggling with concept of facilitating arriving passengers.”

“Buyer beware flying into Heathrow currently, been queuing for 45 minutes to get into the country, 2 people away from getting in and they redirect us to another 45 minute queue,” tweeted user @I_Lasciel_I, referring to the service as “p*** poor stuff”.

Thomas de Lucy wrote: “Not only are we waiting for two hours at passport control but Heathrow staff are all incredibly rude, shouting at people and ignoring others. Maybe a supervisor should be on hand to control staff behaviour.”

For British and European passengers, the “service level agreement” that Heathrow airport has with the Border Force is that almost everyone – 95 per cent of passengers – should be through passport control in 25 minutes. For other nationalities, the time is 45 minutes.

Queue times at passport control are not the responsibility of the airport, nor the airline unless flights have arrived in a bunch, but are managed by the Border Force.

Heathrow says the Border Force failed to achieve its monthly target six time last year.

A spokesperson for the Home Office said: “This morning a technical issue affected e-gates at a number of ports. The issue was quickly identified and has now been resolved. We have been working hard to minimise disruption and continue to monitor the situation closely.

“We apologise to all passengers for the inconvenience caused.” 

She added that security at the border was not affected.