Why does T5 immigration have to be such a joke?
 

Bit of a rant: Why does immigration through T5 have to be such a joke? I am sure all those illegal immigrants from - say Switzerland - pose a serious threat to the UK. Why can the rest of Europe do without border controls, but the UK is plagued by non-working e Gates and long queues?

Rant over. Back to queuing.

:confused: I'm sure that on arriving in mainland Europe from the UK, one is required to clear immigration / border control before being permitted to proceed.

Why does T5 immigration have to be such a joke?
 

I think the rant was comparing our arrangements with Schengen policies.

I was at T5 immigration on Sunday evening and I agree, it was a joke. Three e-gates not working and I waited over half an hour. Really poor impression on anyone visiting us for the first time.

A.) one is mostly greeted by something that resembles speedy processing in Europe, and not something that is on the same level with certain third world countries and/or the US of A.
B.) when travelling between most European countries one does not need to go through immigration, because, most European nations consider it a useless burden on travellers.

When travelling between the countries that form Schengenland, one is travelling between countries that have agreed between themselves to erect a single border control around the outside of the Schengenland area.

The UK isn't part of Schengenland, but that doesn't mean that we have border controls and other European countries don't.

Well, yes. Schengen does away with border controls within Schengen. The fact that the UK doesn't want to join Schengen means a ton of pointless controls. Big fat waste of resources and useless waiting.

In a taxi by now btw...

The outer Schengen border is (based on our experiences last month) considerably easier to cross than the UK border. Waving the outside of a stack of passports is sufficient...

I blame the long waiting times on job cuts by the UKBA. But to be fair, even at busy times when 3 or 4 jumbos have landed within minutes of each other, the EU/EEA queue is always much quicker than the All Other Passports queue. I see people waiting there for hours to get clearance.

Which could be a risk based process. I believe the UK used to do this prior to the current government deciding that limited resources should be used for scanning passports rather than searching for drugs and weapons.

Well, aside from the Schengen question, why not just buy 10 or 20 e-passport kiosks (and maintain them so they work) and speed people up?

I have no idea how much they cost but let's say £50k apiece, I'm sure that's offset by any salary savings, especially over a multi-year period.

I went through about an hour ago and actually didn't find it too bad when compared to the previous few weeks. E-gates are the way to go. My colleague and I tested which was quicker and he won by a clear margin using the e-gates.

Yesterday at 21:20 it took me less than 5 minutes to get through, probably only 2 minutes but I wasn't timing it. Amsterdam yesterday morning, however, was about 30 minutes.

I can't actually remember the last time I had a long wait at LHR T5.

Unfortunately the current UK e-passport scheme seems to require 3 people to operate every 4 kiosks (2 agents and one helper). Of course, the UK could just buy some of the passport readers used by the Dutch or Bulgarian governments which require one agent for any number of kiosks (~95% accuracy versus 70% on British passports), or even reinstate some IRIS terminals.

But they won't, because the people running the UK borders have zero interest in the experiences of those who actually use UK borders.

I find entering the U.K. at T5 to be much more pleasant than returning home to YYZ.

YYZ has a special place in hell though. I love Canada so much but the immigration process you guys have is borderline hostile. ;)

I was detained for two hours because I was a single male travelling on my own...