Photograph by Danny Howard
The government’s £500 million “e-borders” scheme to gather has been shown to have major failings in a new report.
The Home Office claims to be leading Europe with the technology, but independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, John Vine, described fewer than two thirds of passenger movements being covered and almost 650,000 records relating to smuggling being lost.
The programme was designed in 2003 to collect advanced passenger information (API) on every flight to and from the UK to improve immigration control in order to be able to prevent people flying to the UK if they are considered a threat.
Implementation of the programme was expected to have meant that information was recorded on 95% of passenger movements by 2010, but an inspection in 2012 found that only 65% of movements were being recorded.
The report places part of the blame for the failure of the project on a lack of sufficient testing of the programme on train and sea entry points, and difficulties working with European partners on sharing the data.
However, even on flying routes into the UK from non-EU locations, the e-borders programme currently only records data in 78% of cases and the report found the data being recorded to be of a “poor quality”.
The project is expected to have cost £536 million by 2015.