Should airports be allowed to charge for fast lanes at passport control?
Speeding up the queues for those prepared to shell out could make things even slower for those who are not
By B.R.
IT IS possible to put up a defence of the way that the cost of flying is becoming unbundled. Why should those who travel light subsidise those who have packed the kitchen sink? Or those who bring their own lunch pay extra so that everyone on the plane gets a finger sandwich? It is less easy to argue such a case when the service being charged for is essential.
Airports in Britain look set to expand a scheme allowing them to charge passengers to get through passport control more quickly. Flyers arriving at Edinburgh will soon be able to pay £5 ($6.59) to use the FastTrack service (Gatwick and Heathrow already offer something similar). And the Home Office has confirmed that it will allow the scheme, which is run as a joint venture between the airport operator and the UK Border Force, to be rolled out across the country. Airports could charge up to £17.50 to join a queue restricted to perhaps 50 passengers an hour.
This raises three issues. First, all other things being equal, speeding up the experience for those prepared to shell out will make things even slower for those who are not. Fast queues need more officials per passenger, which means fewer for the standard ones.
That might suit both the airports and the Border Force just fine. When a commercial firm wants to nudge customers from a free service to a paid-for one, one way to do so is to make the basic service worse. That is alright if you are upgrading an Evernote subscription. But people stuck in snaking immigration queues don’t view security as something to be monetised. They view it as an essential service carried out by the state. If those waiting in line feel victimised, then resentment will follow. Mark Gibbin, the leader of the ISU union, which represents border and customs staff, has warned that “It’s only a matter of time before serious public disorder and, who knows, even mass breach of the border.” That is hopefully an exaggeration, but he has a point. One could also conclude that anything that makes doing business in Britain more miserable for foreigners, particularly post-Brexit, might be best avoided.
Hence, the second issue is what the money raised by the scheme will be used for. Will it be ploughed into improving service, either by investing in already-overstretched staff or better equipment? Or will it simply be used to cut government expenditure? The Home Office has said the cash raised would “help fund the immigration system, secure the border and invest in improving processes”.
The importance allocated to each of those will help answer the last question. As the world moves towards biometric passports, will a service enabling passengers to jump the line remain useful? Gulliver has never found the facial-recognition gates a particularly smooth experience. (They also, apparently, don’t like sunny days.) But the technology will improve, and hopefully soon it will have the same speedy effect on border queues as self-service check-outs do in supermarkets. Of course, officials will still need to be on hand to deal with the passport equivalent of an unexpected item in the bagging area. But it seems less easy to engineer a fast and slow lane when we are all using electronic gates.
Until that time, for the skinflints amongst us, Gulliver has suggestion: always take a young child with you when travelling. Twice in the past year or so, I have been ushered to the front of the immigration queue thanks an exhausted sprog. In Costa Rica, officers took pity on me as I shuffled my bags along with one foot while balancing a sleeping daughter over my shoulder. And officials at JFK decided to avoid a scene when, after joining the back of the whopping immigration line, the light of my life tried repeatedly tried to curl up and sleep on the floor. I am currently teaching her to wail uncontrollably at the sight of the words "UK Border".
