Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment his Department has made of (a) the effectiveness of ePassport gates in accelerating the border process at UK airports, and (b) potential steps to increase usage of those gates.

The ePassport gates allow Border Force to extract detailed Management Information to allow for regular monitoring of their performance. From this data it has been established that one bank of 10 ePassport gates requiring the support of 2-3 Border Force officers, can process 1200 passengers per hour. It would require 10 Border Force officers to process the same amount of passengers in that timeframe, using manual controls. Since their inception the ePassport gates have processed over 160 million passengers and are now processing approximately 50 million incoming passengers a year accounting for >50% of aviation passenger arrivals per year

Border Force continually looks to increase passenger throughput at the ePassport gates, working with Port Operators to improve queuing, hosting and way finding. Among the initiatives already in place to increase usage has been; the expansion of the Registered Traveller Service , now available to 40 countries and the introduction of the 12-17 scheme to allow accompanied children aged 12-17 to use the ePassport gates.