In what should be no surprise to anyone, the border wait times have extended to London Stansted.
Last night entries into the United Kingdom on a European Economic Area Passport were taking from 90 minutes to two hours.
Which for a mainly European port of entry for low cost carriers is again… disgusting.
The UK Border Force states:
“We flexibly deploy staff to meet demand, meaning that the vast majority of passengers pass through immigration controls quickly.”
“We will not compromise border security but work closely with airport operators to keep delays to a minimum.”
It seems the flexibility didn’t work correctly. Again.
Meanwhile a spokesman for Stansted Airport calls the whole thing unacceptable, with seemly two major queues during the daytime through to evening, and in the late night, saying:
“At peak times queues can be unacceptably long and that was the case earlier.”
“We recognise there needs to be a strong border but we also want to make sure that border staff have the right resources to meet passenger demand.
“We will be talking to the UK Border Force about the queues and the reasons behind them.”
From a first-hand witness, it seems no information was given to delays. with booths staffed, so it seems the UK Border Agencies computers were up the creek.
And it again shows how the UK Border Force is falling to bits, not getting the manpower in the right place at the right time, whilst people are left waiting.
One word describes this: SHAMBLES.
It seems this chaos has been moved from a “One to watch” to “One to report”. Of course, getting any reasonable stats out of the UK Border Agency and BAA is akin to getting blood from a stone. GhettoIFE.com will continue report on the continuing shambles that is the UK Border Agency, and if it improves….
Darn. I was going to come to the UK on the 10th. Guess I have a change of plans. Rome it is.
It’s getting to the point where US Immigration times are getting shorter.
I’d never thought I’d say that!!!!
Apparently they are anticipating 4 hour queues at the tunnel forcing Eurotunnel to cut services in order to cope with our glorious border guards inability to cope. It’s an absolute disgrace and the denial of travel must be a breach of our rights to freedom of movement, Last year before it became topical (the tunnel has always been chaos) I complained to one of the goons at passport control who had the audacity to blame the problem on Eurotunnel and its passengers for making so busy. I suppose the government doesn’t care what people think – but then of course 90% of the tunnel traffic is us poor old brits trying to escape yet it is the same public whose opinion (whipped up by the likes of the Mail and Murdoch’s papers) who seem to think our strict border control is such a good thing however ineffective or inconvenient it is. It’s about time those idiots in Whitehall either got their act together or reconsider joining Schengen – who clearly are 1000% more efficient at policing borders. This would also slash the queues at a stroke.
It’s not worth complaining to UKBA – they are so arrogant about this issues it would be water off a ducks back – they don’t give a sh***. Again maybe we should look to the French for inspiration and think about a riot rather than to feebly complain