UK to introduce exit border checks

[WHBM]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5212130.stm

This could have a significant effect on airport procedures.

All sorts of things. A need to segregate domestic and international pax once again. Probably the end of flight routings such as Edinburgh-Birmingham-Paris, as the pax could not be mixed on the first leg. And yet another understaffed timewasting bureaucratic procedure for everyone to queue up for (presumably crews would need to go through this for each departing leg).

And just how will the immigration controls be improved because the officers have to wear uniforms instead of suits ? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns ......

[Lucifer]

Can't they just get check-in to swipe the passport through the system?

[Jordan D]

Lucifer - regarding your suggestion, what happens if a pax checkin, they scan his passport and then s/he leaves the terminal? (Yes, I can see how they'd recognise this and notify authorities, but it makes for another leaky hole).

Reintroduction of exit control sounds a good idea. Obviously there are issues, but if it worked before ....

Jordan

[MrBernoulli]

As I understand it, you can't 'check-out' your passport until you are airside of security. Therefore, Jordan D, you can't do what you suggest. You have to have a very good reason for coming back through to landside and passport control would need to informed.

[Groundloop]

Wouldn't it be better to spend the money on more immigration officers rather than fancy uniforms for the ones we already have?

[ALLDAYDELI]

the issue of uniforms is nonsense. Its not going to frighten anyone not to dodge the system. If illegals are smart enough, they will get in regardless of what the border patrol officials are wearing.

[Golf Charlie Charlie]

Right after 7 July last year, they did reintroduce passport checks on departure at LHR Terminal 3 (just past security) and I think at some or all other LHR terminals, but I see that has been discontinued. Maybe that was just some sort of trial for a general reintroduction.

[DISCOKID]

of course they should reintroduce exit checks - most other countries do this.

at the moment someone can come here on a tourist or student visa, overstay their visa for 3 years, go back home for christmas and then come back and do exactly the same thing again and it would never be picked up that they had been overstaying illegally for 3 years. i've met lots of people that do that.

try that in america and you'd be banned from entering the country for 10 years.

its not that difficult to have an entry record and a corresponding departure record.

and yes - uniforms do make a difference. you only have to compare how intimidating US immigration is compared to that provided at our airports. anyone up to no good will naturally feel more nervous when faced by someone in uniform - at our airports its more like a meeting with a social worker.

[Taildragger67]

In the States, you keep the stub of the I-94W and hand that back in at check-in for your departure flight from the US; airline hands it to the INS. Not sure what the procedure is for straight-through routings leaving the US (are there any such routings out of the US?) but I can't see how it would be a problem for the initial check-in agent to collect it where an onward boarding pass is issued. That way, the INS knows you haven't overstayed your visa.

As for instances where the stub doesn't get handed in (eg. lost, check-in agent forgets to ask for it), from my observation the INS is pretty realistic - a boarding pass stub (either for that departure from the US, or for travel outside the US and dated after the date of departure from the US), a subsequent passport stamp (anywhere in the world) or even something like an ATM or shopping receipt clearly from outside the US is sufficient evidence that the traveller must have left the US.

As for uniforms... probably won't make a huge amount of difference but when you approach a desk with a uniformed bod, you know it's a serious matter. Approaching someone in office clothes makes it look like they've just had to pull some bods out of the office because the 'real' (ie. uniformed) border guys are either on strike or at lunch. And there may be something in the argument that people 'escaping' may think twice before trying to put one over a uniform than a nice, friendly non-uniformed agent. That is, they won't even approach the desk . Nought to hide, nought to fear.

But in these computerised days, why can't pax booking info be transferred from the airline to the UK IND? We already do it for US-bound flights, with or without a departure passport check.

As for mixing terminals - get a big red 'D' sticker on your domestic boarding pass, or 'I' for international, depending on the prevailing mix at that airport and go through the appropriate channel and get a stamp. Easy.

[Golf Charlie Charlie]

Times change, and I have to agree with Discokid. Many people have said to me that the non-uniformed immigration people in the UK mark something of our civilised approach to doing things, compared with the armed personnel on arriving in other countries, notably the US. But there's no doubt about the faintly intimidating aura of the latter.

That said, even in the US, however, they have become more rigorous on exit checks only at a few airports in recent years, and I don't think they're always tightly policed or the records always updated.

[Ray Darr]

I queried the supervisor yesterday about this new procedure and was told it had been in effect for the past year (??!!), however, this was the first time I had been asked to show my passport to proceed onwards from the security area to the duty-free free-for-all area - and I've passed through major UK airports numerous times over the past year. So it looks like the "on-again-off-again" checks are "on-again".

However, the person that looked through my passport was merely going through the motions (and they DID look like a social worker, I must add...but who gives a rats what they wear...). More importantly, I have many interesting non-standard visas, etc, yet the pages were flipped so fast, the bored scrutinizer could have very well been looking through an animated "flip book"!

IF it accomplished something, maybe it would be an agreeable new procedure. However, it looks like it is yet another grand waste of H.M.'s taxes...

Mind you, it was funny to watch a Mr. Harvinder try to weasel around the queue, and try to use a vain excuse only to be put in place by the said supervisor. GET TO THE BACK OF THE QUEUE, doofus!!

Cheers,
R.D.

[Groundloop]

The introduction of uniforms is probably another ploy by this Government to appear to be doing something!

[Evanelpus]

Exit, Exit!!!!

What about more stringant bloody entry checks..don't get me started.

[Skipness One Echo]

What bloody morons politicians are. They have abandoned border controls against all good advice and now finally hopefully have seen the light!!

[potkettleblack]

According to the BBC it will take the government 8 years. Yep EIGHT bleedin years to restate border controls to what you see in most other parts of the civilised world! They must have torn up the books and binned all the IT systems as I can't see how it can take even more than a year to get it working again. It really is a joke isn't it.

[MarcJF]

You're right we are a joke. This country is a soft touch. I have nothing against anyone entering the UK legally but our border controlls are simply inefficient. Run UK PLC as a business and we'd have been bust years ago. It's time to get things sorted, question is, who's going to do it?

[Leezyjet]

Definately think that uniforms are a must, when you see the state of some of the immigration officers, it really makes them look like a push over if they can't even dress themselves properly. The whole uniform issue automatically demands a certain respect and brings a certain status to it. Most of the way they catch people is by the way they are seen to be behaving in the queue, and anything that makes people more nervous is more likely to catch more people out.

My mate works for Immigration in T3, and when the introduced the outbound checks again, they discovered hundreds of so called asylum seekers going on holiday back to the places that they had supposedly claimed asylum from fearing for their lives or whatever cock and bull story they dreamed up. So it definately is a good idea to bring it back. I was in the aviation industry when they stopped doing checks outbound, and said then it was a terrible idea - back then it was a cost cutting excersise by the then Tory government, and look what a mess it got us into with thousands coming in, and no way of knowing if they ever left again unless they came back in.

It's about time we took a leaf out of Australia's book on who we let into the UK.

:hmm:

[Evanelpus]

Where my partner works the entire contract staff are foreign, mainly Poles and the like. They play spot the Englishman there!! I'm not joking, they told her one day that was a game they played when they were bored. Out of a staff of 25, 4 are English....why didn't we listen more closely to Enoch Powell all those years ago. And before someone flames me for being 'anti black', I'm not, I'm talking about the basis of what his speech was all about. Once foreign workers start arriving, irrespective of coloue, we would be overrun with them. he must be turning in his grave!

[Lucifer]

why didn't we listen more closely to Enoch Powell all those years ago.
Because economically we would be skint. We would all pay far more for basic services, there would be half the number of doctors, and nobody would bother to or want to work throughout the night in 24 hour shops. Immigrants do the economy a world of good manning jobs that we do not want, and contrary to popular belief there are very few of them on benefits at all.

With the population forecast to start declining, I fervently believe we should encourage immigration, else the economic analyses are all pointing downwards - just like Japan. No thanks.

We are a land built of immigrants - if you are British, I mean Romans, Normans, Vikings, Scots, Germans; if you are American, I mean Europeans of every country, American Indians, Mexicans, Chinese and more.

It is only the voice of the economically priviledged, but economically ignorant who oppose immigration.

[PAXboy]

Lucifer Agreed. If we don't want immigrants, then we had better back track a couple of hundred years and tell them not to build up the British Empire. :rolleyes: Let us not forget that we can also go and live in many other countries, as they can come to us. Sounds better than staying in a cocoon.

[Groundloop]

Where my partner works the entire contract staff are foreign, mainly Poles and the like.

As Poland is a member of the EU and so Poles can work anywhere in the EU, what's your point and its relevance to this debate?

[lexxity]

Shall we get this thread back on track eh? This is about exit border controls. It is about catching those who are here illegaly, not those who are entitled to be here under EU rules or who have been granted asylum.

No one has any problem with a person who comes to this country and contributes to it.

[Evanelpus]

Lexxity has hit the nail on the head, if they contribute.

The problem with the particular Poles in question (as mentioned in my previous post) is that they are a lazy workshy bunch of sods who came here to have an easy life and when threatened with discipliniary action,claim they are being discriminate against because they are 'foreign'.

Back to the original topic.........

[Skipness One Echo]

It's not about immigrants per se. It's about whether a refugee from war torn Somalia is able to function well in a 21st century western secular society. Or whether a goat herd from an agrarian who gets to marry a young british girl he's never met for a passport is really what this country needs.
Some succeed. Many build ghettos of isolation and the debate is being hijacked by extremists from both sides.
As a Scot in England, I am a foreigner to an extent but at least I have the skills to fake it......:) :)
However knowing who has a right to be here and who doesn't can only help things along.

[Bangkokeasy]

I have never understood the idea behind not having exit checks. The visa issuing process for the UK is a bureaucratic dog's dinner and an unpleasant experience for the applicants. However, once through it, there are no checks to see if the person actually leaves. You can't pretend that anyone is actually going to be stopped and checked to see if they are an illegal immigrant, once they are out and about in today's PC UK society? Honestly, I don't know why they bother. It seems the policy is to make it as hard and nasty an experience as possible for someone to get into the UK, but then once they are there, just give up. It's a lot like Hong Kong before reunification, where Chinese immigrants were basically allowed to stay, as long as they had the luck or skill to get past the border and into town.

Reintroducing exit checks is a start towards effectively controlling immigration. I have no opinion on the rights or wrongs of immigration per se, but if you don't have a working control system, then you might as well scrap the whole thing.

[TightSlot]

Please keep this thread on the topic originally raised and avoid jetblast style posts - from here on in, I'll delete further posts that make absurd generalisations about nationalities or that stray off topic.

Thank you

[clicker]

Exit controls are one thing but as already mentioned we should have tighter controls for the entry points and better ways of dealing with anyone caught entering illegally.

I've heard of at least two occassions and dealt directly with cases where police officers caught some foreign persons found in the back of a lorry. Once they were brought into police custody we contacted the immigration officers to be told "Give them a rail warrant to Croydon and tell them to make their own way to the immigration offices". When asked if an escort was coming to collect them we were told no. Later it was not a surprise to be told they had not turned up. A neighbouring force had the same problem some 2 years later, which this time made the news.

I wonder how many have skipped in this way?

[striparella]

Right after 7 July last year, they did reintroduce passport checks on departure at LHR Terminal 3 (just past security) and I think at some or all other LHR terminals, but I see that has been discontinued. Maybe that was just some sort of trial for a general reintroduction.

It's still there in the evenings in T3 for certain departures imigration always keep their eye on!

I think it's a brilliant idea.

About a year ago we had a spate of people selling selling their UK visas their passports as well as forged UK visas and passports - and they were all caught by immigration in T3 departures.

[potkettleblack]

Have we worked out why or been fed some spin as to why it is actually going to take 8 years to reinstate the border controls? Like that is a huge amount of time in anyones book!

[ATNotts]

While I can fully understand the point of keeping a very close eye on the coming and goings of non-EU traffic, most other EU countries have signed up to the Schengen agreement, which gives true freedom of movement between participating states.

Surely, if the UK took a more enlightened approach, then the manpower saved by not checking EU arrivals and departures could be redeployed on beefing up checks on those coming to and from non-EU (Schengen) countries, and this be achieved sometime before the next 8 years.

I do know that it's an absolute pleasure driving and flying across most EU internal borders without the nonsence of border controls - once that it is I've left the UK!

[nivsy]

On a personal note i agree with previous post. its very obvious at a lot of european airports that flights to the UK means you are directed through some form of passport control and towards gates that are for UK flights only while those travelling to other destinations within Europe pass through to departure areas without any need for control. In my experience entry to the UK always results in passport checks and ofcourse in some occassions lenghty details as only 1 or 2 immigration officers appear only to be on duty.

Also nowadays due to electronic ticketing at lot of passport checks are undertaken by the airline.

I should think the introduction of departure checks from the UK will result in just more delays for the hard hit passenger - however i can understand the requirement. I just hope they have plenty of immigration/frontier personnel on duty - and some how i doubt that.


Nivsy

[A2QFI]

Have we worked out why or been fed some spin as to why it is actually going to take 8 years to reinstate the border controls? Like that is a huge amount of time in anyones book!

It has now taken over 10 years NOT to introduce the the national database containing the names of all holders of, and applicants for, firearms and shotgun permits in UK. This is a measure which was promised after the killings at Dunblane and should have been easy. This makes 8 years to re-intruduce border exit checks look really really speedy!

[Globaliser]

Surely, if the UK took a more enlightened approach, then the manpower saved by not checking EU arrivals and departures could be redeployed on beefing up checks on those coming to and from non-EU (Schengen) countries, and this be achieved sometime before the next 8 years.There are other issues involved in this, though. One very obvious one, from practical experience, is the different visa lists operated by the UK/Ireland and by Schengenland. There is a huge practical impact on countries with many low-risk visitors like South Africa. If we were to join Schengen, a vast amount of manpower would then be diverted into issuing countless thousands of visas to South Africans.

This illustrates how resource-saving equations are not always easy for the general public to resolve.

And that leaves aside completely the question of whether there is any need for either the UK/Ireland or Schengenland to demand visas of South African visitors.

[J.Don.]

After many years of passing back & forth between LHR & entry points in the USA it always made an impression on me as to how smart the Americans looked whether police or imigration or customs, on coming into LHR the police,customs & security were a scruffy lot, so perhaps we had better leave imigration in civvies.

[el !]

Globaliser being S.A. a country where a very large part of the population is of very low income, they are seen as potential illegal immigrants hence the visa requirement.

[nivsy]

Our lot may sometimes look scruffy as posted above but at least, unlike our American cousins - in general are not rude and make all pax feel like a criminal!!:ouch:

[Globaliser]

Globaliser being S.A. a country where a very large part of the population is of very low income, they are seen as potential illegal immigrants hence the visa requirement.I can see that argument.

But the UK is probably the European country that is most hysterical about illegal immigration, and we do not have a visa requirement for South Africans. And this is despite the fact that we speak one of the two official South African languages that are of European origin, so would be a natural destination for many South Africans

Clearly, therefore, the fear is not in fact justified.

Moreover, there are many South Africans who have a genuine connection with the UK and for whom a visa requirement would be extremely onerous. I can see this (and similar situations) therefore being a real stumbling block to joining Schengenland and having to bring our visa list into line with the Schengenland list.

[CWL2YOW]

For a number of months, I was flying from Cardiff to Belfast and almost without exception, when arriving back in Wales, we were asked to produce ID by, non-uniformed 'officers'. I've deliberately put officers in apostrophes as I have no idea who they were. I asked why we needed to show ID and the response was a frosty, "Security" followed by a few minutes of questionning (even though they had seen me and my passport for weeks before). Actually, thinking about it, sometimes we were asked for ID by the same people flying out of Cardiff.

I wondered why this took place, as I was travelling from one part of the UK to another. I was never asked for ID travelling from Cardiff to London on the train or when flying into City, for example. Was NI singled out due to its history of troubles?

Any ideas?

[lexxity]

Special branch, standard practice on BFS/BHD flights.

[Globaliser]

I've deliberately put officers in apostrophes as I have no idea who they were.Special Branch, I'd guess.

[ETA:] Blast, beaten to it by lexxity.

[Globaliser]

... how smart the Americans looked whether police or imigration or customs, on coming into LHR the police,customs & security were a scruffy lot ...All a matter of taste, I suppose. Most US immigration officers stuffed into their ill-fitting and quite unnecessary uniforms look a lot less good than the UK immigration officers who have taken a little care over choosing their own work wardrobe. (In fact, some are even quite cute.)

[el !]

Globaliser, I agree with you and personally in principle would love to see all visa requirements abolished, as well as many other things.

I think the real issue is that the UK wants to remain indipendent in certain policies, like currency and circulation of people (visa requirements is really a subset of the latter). The special relation the UK has with SA would be probably be accepted by the rest of the Shengen countries, but reciprocal demands about waiving visa for other states may not be meet with equal enthousiasm by the UK.

With the current state of things in Europe and the growing security paranoia, probably nobody wants to pick-up this battle and things will remain as they are for a while.