E-passports f iasco

Priti under fire after IT crash at Heathrow led to 4-hour queues

PRITI Patel was accused of overseeing a ‘total border shambles’ last night after massive delays at airports across the country.

A catastrophic computer breakdown led to huge queues at Heathrow, with waits of up to four hours.

And suitcases were left to pile up by overloaded baggage carousels as their owners got stuck in lines up to a kilometre long. The nationwide breakdown was declared a ‘critical incident’ by border chiefs. Sources blamed the Home Secretary for the IT shambles, which saw several crucial computer systems collapse simultaneously. One passenger said it was like arriving ‘in a Third World country’.

‘The An computer immigration systems source just said: cannot cope. The Home Secretary has sanctioned too many changes to the way the IT operates, all at the same time, and it is disastrous.

‘It is a total border shambles and Priti Patel has singularly failed to address it. She runs the department – and she must ultimately take the blame for this.’ The huge IT glitch caused the Home Office’s new £372million border security system to collapse across the UK,

shutting down all automatic passport ‘e-gates’. Two other IT systems – which both have to be filled out by immigration officers at the border – also crashed at the same time. It meant all documents had to be manually checked by UK Border Force officials – with many passengers complaining there were not enough staff to cope with the number of arrivals. The IT crash, which happened late yesterday morning and was not resolved until mid-afternoon, affected every airport in the country. And it came only a month after the Mail revealed that the computer system, known as Border Crossing, was suffering repeated breakdowns after being rushed into use at the end of June.

Passenger Dan Gare, arriving at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 yesterday, said the situation was an ‘absolute joke’ and a ‘disgrace’.

‘No e-gates working and horrendous queues to get through the UK border,’ he tweeted.‘You couldn’t have organised a less Covid-safe system if you tried.’

Another traveller, Andrea McGinn, described the delays at Terminal 5 as ‘shocking’ and said it was ‘like arriving in a Third World country’.

And documentary maker Louis Theroux shared a picture of the Heathrow queue on Twitter, describing it as a ‘human logjam’.

A spokesman for the airport described the queue times as ‘unacceptable’. He added: ‘Border Force are working to process passengers and we have called on the UK Government to address the problem as a matter of urgency.’

It is the latest blow for the costly system, which sources last month warned would be ‘particularly vulnerable when there are higher numbers of travellers’. The database, which was nearly four years overdue, checks travellers’ names against terrorism records, the Police National Computer and immigration records.

It was rushed in to replace the Warnings Index system, which had to be scrapped as it could not handle EU travellers who must now be checked in the same way as other international passengers.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘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 apologise to all passengers for the inconvenience caused.’

‘Like arriving in the Third World’