Minister apologies for passport e-gate failures
It's caused disruption at a number of airports across the UK
Last updated 8th May 2024
A minister has apologised to passengers after a fault with Border Force passport e-gates caused widespread disruption at airports across the UK.
Travellers faced long queues on Tuesday night at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and Manchester because of the "technical issue" which lasted several hours.
E-gates, automated border gates, use facial recognition to check the identity of a person in order to let them enter the UK without talking to a Border Force officer.
There are more than 270 e-gates at 15 airports and railway stations across the country, according to the Government's website.
Because of the outage, Border officials had to manually process travellers instead, with images and footage circulating online showing long queues forming at passport control at several airports.
Speaking in the Commons on Wednesday, Tom Pursglove said an investigation had determined the incident was caused by "technical issues within the Home Office network."
There was no indication of "malicious cyber activity" behind the fault, the minister for legal migration and the border told MPs.
Engineers detected a wider system network problem at 7.44pm on Tuesday and e-gates at UK airports came "back online" shortly after midnight on Wednesday, according to the Home Office.
Mr Pursglove said: "I sincerely apologise for the disruption that occurred. I can assure the House that the Home Secretary and I will be unswerving in our determination to ensure that every possible lesson is learned, to ensure that this does not happen again."
Describing how teams "quickly swung into action", Mr Pursglove said the fault was responded to "within six minutes", and once the fault was identified, "officials worked closely with partners to rectify the problem and restore service".
Security checks were "maintained throughout", he said, adding: "Border security was not compromised at any point and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity. Police access to operational systems was unaffected."
Labour's shadow Home Office minister Dan Jarvis joined Mr Pursglove in paying tribute to "passengers who waited patiently for many hours, some of them after very long flights" but said the e-gate system is "no longer reliable enough."
He told the Commons: "I'm sure that the House will agree that the chaotic scenes across many of the UK major airports last night are unacceptable.
"Not least, given e-gates have failed on several occasions in recent years.
"That is unacceptable and it brings into sharp focus how the current high capacity e-gates system is no longer reliable enough and risks further damaging public trust in the Government's management of our border security."
The response of Border Force was evidence that "overall the contingency plans did work", Mr Pursglove said, adding that there was a "permanent fix" for the specific technical issue that caused the fault, as he insisted this was an "extremely rare occurrence".