Exit Control at Heathrow?
 

Hello All!

I was reading on another thread that the UK does not enforce exit control...??

So they do not know how long you stayed????? If thats the case can someone please explain to me this E-Borders program?

The reason I ask is I came over in April originally stating I was only staying for two weeks but changed my mind, extending my visit twice totaling 4 months ( I was stamped with a 6 month visa) so I did not overstay...but I am going back soon and was wondering if they will know ( the IO) of the duration of my last visit? I didn't do anything illegal but I want to know what I'm in for.

I dont know what you mean by enforcing exit control, but you go through passport control upon arrival, and I know they look at dates and visa legnth.

Yes, they know when I entered the UK last but do they know when I left is the question? :confused:

Unless I am mistaken, the UK should reinstate border checks for departing passengers. It was the case on a few of my flights out of LHR T2 in June, but the desks are currently not manned.

At least at LHR, they do it when the feel like doing it. Purely luck of the draw.

I'm pretty i'd have known if they did it to me...although while I was waiting in line to check in a guy with a portable desk came by and slid my passport and then placed a sticker on that said ITCS I believe....

Mmmm...that wouldn't be LHR. CDG, most likely. Have you been there with this passport?

The UK used to have exit controls where they stamped your passport when you left the country.

The logic was that it was only going to pick up people who overstayed their visa when they were leaving the country, so you might as well let them leave anyway instead of detaining them further. If someone was overstaying their visa, immigration would have to detect them while they were still in the UK, not when they were leaving the country anyway. So what is the benefit of stamping passport when people leave. As usual, it is a cost benefit issue.

From time to time, the exit immigration controls come back in when there was heightened security at the airport. I suspect that was checking people going airside as oppose to people leaving the country.

T3 is the only terminal where there is a high frequency of the immigration exit desks being manned. T2 has the desks but rarely manned. No desk at T1 for BA entrance nor at T4 or T5.

That would be VS not BA. For some strange reason, VS pay a separate firm to check pax visa requirements for travel. VS staff do not do this. Once my sticker came off and I was not allowed to board at the gate until they got the non-VS agent to recheck my visa and put a new sticker on my passport. Weird. Talk about a job creation scheme. I suspect the agency pays if VS lands a pax with no right of entry to a country and VS has to fly the pax back to the UK. Cost of recovering cost of return flight from the pax is with the agency.

Nothing to do with UK immigration.

StevenShev--I def departed from LHR when I got that sticker?


KenJohn- What's VS ( sorry not down with the lingo yet!)

So what I gather is they DONT know when I left the UK?? :confused:

VS is Virgin Atlantic. It's odd that you'd have one of those stickers departing Heathrow. Which carrier were you on?

BA, VS, and United certainly don't do it. Was this very recent on one of the newly moved-in American carriers (Continental, Delta, US Airways, Northwest)

It's a risk. It's quite likely UK Immigration knows when you left, but certainly not guaranteed. They can always ask next time, but you should know that even when they do check, they just look at the dates, they don't actually provide you with an exit stamp.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 es61i)

Yes, they do know when you enter and leave the UK. All passports are scanned on entry, and airlines have the responsibility to scan them on departure. The data is then correlated by immigration (or whatever they're called now). The stamp is little more than a manual backup and souvenir.

if you overstay, you will have problems returning, or applying for future visas, etc. There's little sense in deporting already departing passengers.

londonbound86, you had permission to stay in the UK for six months, you stayed for four. Entirely legal, and you shouldn't have anything to worry about. There is nothing wrong with staying longer than originally intended - I'm sure you're not the only UK visitor whose plans changed while in the country.

And stut, I don't think you are right about airlines having to scan passports for Immigration. Airlines have to check passengers' identities and ensure that they have valid documents for the place they are travelling to, but that's all. I certainly didn't have my passport scanned by anyone last time I left the country - checked in online, went straight through to the departure lounge at NWI, had someone glance at my passport at the gate - that was all.

Also, no records are kept of people who leave the country on private flights - the only time passenger lists have to be submitted for private flights is when the destination is in the Common Travel Area (Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Ireland), and those records go to Special Branch (=police) only, not to Immigration. (All a hangover from the IRA days)

To get back to the original point - londonbound86, you have nothing to worry about as you did not overstay.

That's my experience too. But perhaps it is different for non-EU passport holders?

I don't think so.

I have a US passport and a UK passport. Whenever I travel to the States, the check-in folks always check me in with my US passport.

But I always enter the UK on my UK passport (actually I go through IRIS when I can, but it's linked to my UK passport).

Surely there would be huge confusion if the airline reported me having left on my US passport, but immigration had no record of my entering...?

Then I stand corrected :)