PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Heathrow Airport 'may not cope during Olympics'
Old 6th May 2012, 13:25
  #97 (permalink)  
rjc54n
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: UK
Posts: 13
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
This mess seems to be a depressingly familiar story of poor decision making driven by incompatible requirements, misplaced faith in technology and a shrill, partisan politics over-influenced by opinion polls and the media. It has been a long time in the making.

The first requirement was the political decision to toughen border checks. A heady mix of terrorist threat and public unease over immigration and asylum whether exaggerated or real, created a political will for perceived tighter borders.

The second requirement was to reduce expenditure in the face of a large deficit, recession and expanding borrowing. To a greater or lesser degree this was the narrative of all parties.

In order to do more work (tighter checks) with less resource (budgets and headcount cuts) productivity must increase substantially. I imagine that this was anticipated as a result of technology investment in biometrics and automated borders. I also imagine that those productivity improvements were grossly over-estimated and under delivered (the error rate for E-passport gates is well documented.)

So something had to give. In the first place the border force took the very pragmatic approach of relaxing checks for low risk passengers at peak times. Alas, this was deemed politically unacceptable (after much press hysteria) and Brodie Clark was sacrificed to protect his political masters.

So now they have nowhere to go. The technology won’t improve things quickly. A pragmatic approach to checking has been ruled out as political suicide and there is a finite pool of trained staff (probably feeling overworked and under siege right now). Given capacity is limited and insufficient queues have increased.

As always the crisis will eventually be managed and the news agenda will move on. However I do find it vaguely depressing that our current climate of public discourse discourages sensible, nuanced, truthful debate and makes these sort of issues more rather than less likely.
rjc54n is offline