The 2014 Immigration Act re-introduced exit checks UK ports and borders. The government now faces the challenge of ensuring passengers don’t face long delays while keeping the country secure. How do you think technology can help the government to strike that balance?
Technology is absolutely fundamental to maintain the balance between the facilitation of travel and security, especially today when there has been a huge growth in the number of people using their passports, and according to some estimations, the number of passengers is going to rise to almost 1.5 billion by 2017.
Studies that have been done around traveller dissatisfaction also reveal that the second biggest area of dissatisfaction has always been security and border control procedures.
By leveraging technology to automate the process, you take away the administrative function of having to manually check travel forms, which then allows officers to do what they are really there to do, which is to check passengers as individuals. So there is a compelling case for automation!
Often when automation of transport procedures is mentioned, there is the impression that it’s being introduced to replace officers. Is this the case?
There has always been this concern that the increase of automation means that there is going to be a reduction in the number of staff. Actually, we haven’t seen that. What we have seen is that automation frees up the resources to effectively start looking at the small percentage of people who are perceived to have higher risk and whom we want to spend more time and effort on.
Automation doesn’t completely take out the human element because you still need the intuition and the experience of an officer, what it does do is relieve officers of a repetitive task and therefore the potential for oversight of issues and not picking up on things. It’s about getting the balance right, but on the whole, automation is an aid rather than something which is a detractor from the environment it’s being placed into.
The Home Office previously had trouble with the e-borders programme, scrapping the contract in 2010. How can you ensure the rolling out of a big project like exit checks is done in a cost-effective manner, and that borders don’t come grinding to a halt?
There are always lessons learnt from large scale public procurement exercises. Obviously, the UK has learnt from what it has done previously.
One of the things regarding e-borders, and the general perception internationally, was that it was always going to be one of those leading implementations. Lots of people were looking at how that was going to work, and how they could benefit from the experience of the UK. But with e-borders you are starting to increase the scope of an activity, and also the fact the e-border is meant not only look at it from a perspective of air transport but also looking at general aviation – private jets for example – and then maritime and rail.
Perhaps the experience is to look at what you need to do in bite-size chunks, and to solve specific problems and transport modes. I would say the scope of e-borders was too large but I think technology has matured, and understanding has matured – as a result of operational experience – so moving forwards you could provide the equivalent of an e-border / i-border system very cost-effectively. You just need to fully understand how you can do it, and what the benefits of a quick delivery are.
Which countries have you worked with to deliver automation at borders? What lessons have you learnt from those experiences?
We’ve had some experience in working on delivering biometric entry / exit systems – manually operated as well as automatic.
The most current operation we have going on is in Italy. We work with the Ministero Dell’ Interno (MDI), as well Aeroporti di Roma in Fiumicino. The Italian government wanted to have the ability to not only check people inbound, but also people exiting the country as well. We piloted a system and it has been operational for about a year now in providing an automated system for both entry and exit. That has worked well, and the way that the system has been deployed has worked well.
We’ve also learnt lessons from what we did on the entry-systems – reducing the administrative burden of an immigration officer from filling out and typing, taking documentation from landing cards and declaration cards and so forth, and moving that to an automated position of self-service on a kiosk is something that we’ve worked on as well.
We’ve worked in Jamaica with Passport, Immigration and Customs Agency (PICA) to provide kiosks on arrival in Montego Bay and Kingston. Here you’ve got two different types of environments – very heavily tourist orientated in Montego Bay but a more business environment in Kingston. This meant that the passengers can work on their declaration on a kiosk and get issued a receipt and then take that to an officer. The officer can then just concentrate on inspecting the travel document, the passport and the receipt to verify the individual and they will know the background checks on the individual have been done.
Also what we have done in the United States, and what they call automated passport control, has been very much the same thing when the US wanted to take the officers back to pre-9/11 where customs officers spent more time inspecting and looking at the individual, looking at the behaviour of the individual.
Ray Batt is the Director Business Development(EUR), Government and Security Solutions, Government Solution Line (GSL) at SITA. SITA is the world's leading specialist in providing border control technology, as well as air transport communications and information technology solutions.