That got you reading!

I went through the new e-passport gates at LHR T5 tonight and it was quite clear to me that the UK Government has now stopped bothering to check passports for certain passengers - probably using a crude form of racial profiling.

I say this not to be controversial, but for good reason.

Tonight I went through the new e-passport gates at T5. I inserted my passport, never looked directly at the screen, never had more than a half of my face, most of the time a third, in the face recognition box and all of that time in profile, never for a moment full face.

The green light came on for me to exit.

Let's ponder this.

The UK now has such fantastic face recognition software that it only needs a partial view from a different aspect to confirm identity.

This is of course light years away from any other countries' software.

Let's consider reality.

The e-passport gates project was an ill-conceived replacement for IRIS. It has never actually worked as intended.

If the system is set to automatic mode with coarse facial recognition, it will let virtually anyone through. During the testing it happily admitted pensioners even though the husband was using his wife's passport by mistake. Alternatively, the system can be set to fine facial marching. The only problem is that it throws out 75-80% of passengers as not matching and needing manual confirmation.

A sane organisation would have recognised that this simply does not work and scrapped it. It might even have continued with IRIS. However, we are dealing with the Hone Office.

The work around for a failed "automated" system is to have border agents behind the scene (although you can see them if you look for them) stare at the video feed from the e-passport booth to see if that matches the scan on the passport chip.

Previously there were a few Border Agents doing this task; on tonight's performance I suspect numbers have been reduced.

To be honest, as an experienced user of IRIS and other facial recognition software, the speed with which the gate opened and the fact that (intentionally on my part) my full face was never seen by the camera can only mean one thing - the Border Agency is not too fussed who gets in.

I don't know it for sure, but passport says white male was probably enough to get the "Admit" button pushed without ever seeing my face.

Now I could be wrong, but when a frequent poster to this board says that, think twice. Without full disclosure of any relationship with the Home Office, can you believe what he says?

I can only say what I saw. I very much doubt this was a one-off, training issue or system fault.

The reality is the UK government have invested in a system that doesn't work and cut its border staff to a level where it now has no effective border controls.

... And that from a government that criticises Schengen!!!