Question... don't the UKBF staff have access to passenger manifests well before arrival? The number of truly last-minute international bookings can't be that large. They could then staff accordingly, knowing the rough breakdown of UK PP holders, EU, and non-EU....

That's the way I understood it, but apparently aircraft can arrive 10 minutes early [or even late] … at which point the front-line "managers" seem incapable of doing anything about manning levels.

The concept of how to resolve this aspect is, of course, quite transparent to many of us here.

Not at all scientific, but have come through T3 and T5 in the past 10 days in the morning (ca. 9am) and early evening (ca. 5.30pm), and the EU queue has been much better than my previous recent experiences (say max 5-10 mins wait for non-IRIS users) with most desks manned. However, in a possibly related development, HMRC has been notably absent from customs downstairs (came off non-EU flights so was going through the green channel...)

Today I got a response to a complaining email I sent the Home Office a couple of weeks ago, which was at least somewhat apologetic

Came through the EU control at T5 today at about 14.15. There was no one queuing for the electronic gate (and it worked) and hardly any queue at the human desk.

Can I join? Sounds fun!! :D

The BBC are reporting (following a freedom of information request) that
£3.5 Million was paid in staff bonuses last financial year to the UKBA. :mad:

Strike starts tonight for 24hrs.

You couldn't make it up.

Welcome to England.

Great news by the sound of it, the last time this happened things ran much smoother than usual.

If you can get past the border! ;)

I saw this headline too. "UK Border Agency paid £3.5m in bonuses". I was then baffled a couple of paragraphs later by the assertion that "the highest bonuses in the past year were £10,000".

Well it turns out that the £3.5m figure was the total, for the entire border agency. I assumed it was the figure for some individuals on my first reading. Anyone who thinks that is news presumably has no idea what the scale of the salaries bill would be for a large organization. £3.5m is a drop in the Home Office ocean. That doesn't mean goverment should waste money, but without knowing a lot more detail about the salary structure and who got bonuses it is really hard to criticize. But then detailed understanding is a rare thing in the journalistic world.

Having said that, there is no excuse at all for the recent queues. The target for normal ops should be a wait of no more than 5-10 minutes in any queue. Some countries manage this. They have to process everyone eventually and it really doesn't take much more staff on their part to process people as fast as they arrive, rather than let them back up to these preposterous levels. In other words, whether people queue for 5 minutes or three hours the border agency have to do more or less the same amount of work. I'm sure the mathematics of queuing, which is quite an interesting subject, is poorly understood by some significant people somewhere in the management chain - who should be reassigned to something where no thought is required, or fired.

Maybe this is why Canada and UK still have very strong ties. Both of them like strikes at the airport. The only difference is that one of them actually does something about it (not that it is the best option), and the other doesn't.
OTOH if the CBSA were to strike, I don't think I would be affected too much with NEXUS. Going through security might be, though.

The staff bonuses come from the staff pay budget. If the bonuses were abolished then that £3.5m would have be given to all staff via (small) increases in their pay rates because it is part of the pay pool and in effect topsliced from the pay rates.

It is not money that could simply be spent on other things or retained by the treasury.

There has just been a report on Today (Radio 4). Some bloke had done a survey last August (so why has it taken 10 months to publish it?) where he spoke to staff (the lunatics) and looked at the way queues are measured (in the asylum). He concluded that staff were not at the right place when needed.

This is typical BBC propaganda against the current government. The report has no relevance to the current situation, being so old. The pitiful Evan Davis just planted banal questions. He did ask one about IRIS, the guy could not answer it, and off we went into more platitudes.

I have one question. 'Do the unions have any influence in rostering the staff'? If the answer is 'Yes' I think we know the root of at least part of the problem.

Such a scheme would be allowed only for those with non-EEA/Swiss nationality. Freedom of movement within the EU is guaranteed without payment.

Very true. I still enter France on my British ID card, and the French border police are fully aware that the UK coalition government abolished the scheme. Yet if I tried to enter my own country with the same card, they would cause me a massive delay until I showed my passport.

Are you sure? To my knowledge, the Netherlands has implemented a paid-for scheme called Privium which offers express access through immigration. I would have thought that freedom of movement is guaranteed by having the normal desks, and what a country offers by way of other options or facilities is up to that country.