As the Civil Aviation Authority warns Heathrow and Gatwick airports to cut queuing times at security or face penalties, airport users have called for similar sanctions to be imposed on immigration queues.
Stansted airport has been singled out as the worst offender after passengers complained of “dangerous crushes” in an overcrowded hall, with ineffective queue management and delays of up to 50 minutes at passport control.
“I flew in from Seville last Sunday night and the crowd must have been 70 deep,” reported the Sunday Times journalist Katie Bowman. “It was more like being at a gig than an airport. Children were being pushed over by the crush and there was a danger of people being trampled. Clearly, they can’t accommodate the numbers of passengers now using the airport.” Steve Wong, who regularly passes through Stansted, said: “It’s chaos. The queues are a free-for-all.” The airport’s owner, BAA, disagreed, saying no improvements are planned for the immigration area. “We’ve got planning permission to extend the hall, but we’re not going to, because we don’t need to,” it said. “Yes, the immigration area does get busy, especially on Sunday nights, when all the weekenders fly home, but it never gets dangerously crowded.”
BAA insisted it monitored congestion and would delay transit trains if crowds developed, but said that responsibility for managing passport control lay with the Home Office. But when we called the Immigration Service, we got this rather cursory response: “The introduction of more comprehensive checks is a matter of government policy. It is recognised this has increased the time taken for passengers to pass through the controls, but every effort has been made to keep waiting times to a minimum.”
Source: Chris Haslam, Times Online
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