Legal News
With emergency staff gone the airline passengers would face longer queues in the coming days says managers (10 September 2012)
Date: 10/09/2012
The extra emergency guards from the Ministry of Defence who were drafted to help tackle the Olympics rush are due to leave the Heathrow at the end of the month and the pre Olympics staffing issue seems to come to haunt the immigration desks as managers at Heathrow have warned of huge delays for airlines passengers in the coming weeks due to immigration staff shortages.
Passengers had to face queues with waits of up to four hours to get through passport control at Britain's busiest airport at the beginning of summer because of the same staffing issue.
Forty-five minutes was the maximum waiting time allowed under Border Force rules for non-EU visitors but managers have predicted much longer queues as the remaining staff struggle to cope.
Senior immigration officers warn the situation is likely to get 'progressively worse' as time goes on unless more staff are employed.
The UK Border Force is recruiting at least 70 new immigration officers for Heathrow but many have never worked on passport control and will not be trained for up to nine months.
The Daily Star reported that a 'large number' of serving officers applied for the new posts but were rejected after failing a controversial new online test administered by private firm Capita Resourcing.
The new test has not been helpful with critics saying that the tests asked irrelevant questions such as stock-taking at a music shop.
A senior immigration source told the newspaper when Britain’s borders were under increasing pressure, rejecting applications from experienced immigration officers based on a flawed online test in favour of people with little or no experience of the frontline was making no sense.
But the UK Border Force insists it is prepared to deal with shortage.
A UK Border Force spokesman said that it had tried and tested plans in place to deal with busy periods.
It said that it was keeping some contingency staff in place until the new recruits were in place.
A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services Union added the Government needed to learn the lessons of the last 18 months.
He said they had always argued that UKBA and the Home Office shouldn’t be cutting so many experienced jobs.