Do you hate airport e-gates? Me too. The instructions are poor, the facial recognition frequently fails and the ‘Don’t abuse our staff’ posters tell you you’re trapped in a system that’s bound to annoy. Last Saturday it went from bad to worse, when all 270 e-gates at UK entry points stopped working. ‘A technical nationwide border system issue’, the Home Office called it. But I think we should know who’s responsible – and a Hollywood-hacker-style trawl has led me to a 2021 report by David Neal, ‘independent chief inspector of borders and immigration’.
Neal reveals that a single-supplier contract for UK e-gates was awarded in 2013, until 2023-24, to a Portuguese firm called Vision-Box. ‘Home Office colleagues’, says Neal, ‘believe it’s highly unlikely the UK-wide estate would ever suffer an entire outage’ but procedures are in place ‘to escalate (and resolve) service failures… to Vision-Box’.
Confusion as to who’s in charge of e-gate upgrades, including removal of ‘legacy data systems’, may be another part of the story.
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