E-Borders moves ahead as carriers voice concerns

Eurostar fears check-in queues will get longer when e-Borders comes into force

With the prospect of controversy over privacy, freedom of movement and ambitious targets, the £750m e-Borders programme is likely to be the next major government IT project to come under increasing scrutiny as it rolls out across the UK and overseas.

The concept of the scheme is simple. It allows the UK to push its border controls further out to the point of passenger embarkation ­ – anyone boarding a plane, boat or train travelling to the country will have their passport details checked before they depart.

“By 2014 we want to cover all routes into and out of the UK and monitor more than 250 million passenger movements a year,” Julie Gillis, programme director for e-Borders, told Computing.

Carriers will be required to provide all the information on the biographical page of a passport to the Home Office as part of the check-in process.

This information is fed through to a control room with 250 staff, including representatives from all law-enforcement agencies, which will be up and running in Manchester by the end of the year ­ currently the UK Border Agency is operating a smaller version.

Checks are made against crime, immigration and terrorism watch lists before a passenger is allowed to travel. But this only skims the surface of how law enforcement can benefit from the system.

Data will be retained in a live database for five years and in an archive for a further five ­ making 10 years in total. This allows police and law enforcement to “mine” data ­ searching for suspicious patterns that could help target criminal activity.

Coverage of the scheme is increasing ­ by the end of this year it will track 60 per cent of journeys into and out of the UK, and aims to cover 95 per cent by the end of 2010.

But earlier this month some carriers criticised the programme’s tight timetables and said the plans were too ambitious. Currently, about a third of journeys ­ – mostly flights –­ are monitored. Because most scheduled air journey s are booked in advance, the information can be collected before travel using existing systems and passed on to the UK Border Agency with little hassle.

But with ferry services, charter airlines and Eurostar trains, journeys are often not booked in advance. And if they are, systems are often not configured to collect biographical passport data ­ in many cases just a name is provided.

Tim Reardon from the Chamber of Shipping told the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee earlier this month that capturing information at point of embarkation could lead to hours of delays as coach passengers have their details processed.

“We’ve been looking at this for four years and we still haven’t found a solution,” he told MPs. Representatives from Eurostar made similar complaints.

Eddie Redfern, head of regulatory affairs at TUI Travel, said complying with e-Borders requirements would cost Thomson, Thomas Cook and Monarch ­ the three main UK charter airlines ­ a combined £13.5m for no benefit to the companies.

“We have encountered significant delays where we are already delivering e-Borders requirements on certain routes,” he said. “And we are still being pressured heavily to [extend e-Borders to] new routes.”

Gillis said that e-Borders officials are as keen as the carriers to find cost-effective solutions, and she said sites introduced so far had been successful.

“There is no system yet in place for maritime and that’s why they’re not going live until 2010,” she said. “We’ve had no one [with systems that have gone live] report to us yet they have suffered problems with queues.”

But carriers claim their difficulties are genuine and not a negotiating tactic for watered-down regulations, citing legal issues over restricting the right to free movement, commercial monitoring of state documents, and problems with the mass transfer of passenger data contravening the European Data P rotection Directive.

The UK Border Agency says it is talking with the European Commission to resolve these issues before next year.

New technology at forefront of border security strategy
E-Borders is part of a broader transformation programme aimed at securing UK borders. Facial recognition technology that automatically matches a face against the digital image stored on a passport will be rolled out to check that those arriving are who their passport says they are.

From 2011 a replacement clearance system will be rolled out at UK immigration desks which will take fingerprint biometrics from arrivals to prove they are the same person who applied for a visa or passport – overseas visa applicants must now submit their fingerprint details to be cross-checked against UK databases.

Also from 2011, the National Identity Register (NIR) will hold a record of passport and ID card holders’ biographical details and a record of their biometrics. Border officials will be able to check details against the NIR, though the Tories have promised to scrap it.