A Tory minister has apologised for e-gate chaos which caused misery for thousands of passengers at UK airports.
Tom Pursglove admitted the IT failure was “highly regrettable” as he faced questions about repeated incidents. Labour warned that there can’t be a repeat of the chaos.
Legal Migration Minister Mr Pursglove vowed to learn lessons after passengers at Heathrow, Stansted, Gatwick, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Manchester endured long delays. He told the Commons that the delays were “frustrating” for passengers – but said officials are confident it wasn’t a cyber attack. He said: “Border security was not compromised at any point, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity. Police access to operational systems was unaffected as a result of the outage.”
Labour shadow Security Minister Dan Jarvis wared that similar failures will impact on public confidence. He said: “I am sure that the House will agree that the chaotic scenes across many of the UK’s major airports last night are unacceptable, not least given E-gates have failed on several occasions in recent years.
“The system collapsed at the start of the late May Bank holiday weekend in 2023 because of a failed system upgrade and in 2021, technical issues caused the gates to fail three times in two months. That is unacceptable and it brings into sharp focus how the current high capacity e-gates system is no longer reliable and risks further damaging the public trust in the government’s management of our border security.”
He said: “There cannot be another repeat of the chaos seen at Britain’s border last night. And the government must do everything it can to resolve these persistent problems once and for all.”
Addressing passengers caught up, Mr Pursglove said: “I can understand their frustrations and I sincerely apologise for it.” He went on to say that experts are confident there is a “permanent fix”. He said: “This is an extremely rare occurrence. He will recognise the fact that you can never guarantee that any IT system will ever be 100% reliable 100% of the time.”
He said a “thorough investigation” is taking place. The issue was first detected shortly before 7.45pm, and resolved just after midnight. Border officials were left to manually process passengers, leading to long queues.
A Home Office spokesperson said in a statement early on Wednesday: “eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight. As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7.44pm last night, a large scale contingency response was activated within six minutes. At no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity.”
E-gates are automated border gates that use facial recognition to check the identity of a person. There are 270 of them in total at 15 air and rail ports in the UK. They were designed to “enable quicker travel into the UK”.