Heathrow could be increasing landing fee levy
2nd May 2012
Following hour long queues at Heathrow's border control, airport authorities are drawing up a plan to increase landing fees to pay for more immigration staff
Updated 2nd May 2012
Airlines have spoken out against proposals to increase landing fee levies to help cut immigration queues. Whilst British Airways aren't against a fee increase per se, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa and Scandinavian Airlines have all voiced their opinions against an increased levy.
Original news story
A discussion between BAA, which owns Heathrow, and airlines is under way to try and resolve extremely long immigration queues by increasing the levy of landing fees. After last week's fiasco at Heathrow's border control, it is hoped that the levy will enable more immigration officers to be on standby during busy periods.
Chief executive of International Airlines Group, Willie Walsh, told Radio 4's Today Programme that airlines were willing to pay higher landing fees, as long as the hike was met with better services. “We are not prepared to pay a government that wastes money,” he added.
No official proposal has been sent to the Home Office as yet, so the potential additional costs to airlines and passengers is unknown. Currently, the tax costs passengers £19.30 each but any increase would have to be approved the Civil Aviation Authority.
BAA already receives £1 billion every year from the landing levy, some of which is spent on new border control technology like the automatice-passport gates. However some of these costly systems have already been scrapped after only six years of use.
Despite the current landing surcharge and various time saving technologies, the airport is still struggling to cope with the queues at immigration. Heathrow's Terminal 3 broke the official time limit 107 times in the first 15 days of April this year. Some non-EU citizens were left waiting for up to 91 minutes – more than double official time limit.
Immigration minister Damian Green attributed the problems faced by the Border Force last week to bad weather. According to the minister, the storms caused delays, bunching of flights and an influx of passengers at one time.
Regardless of last week's weather, the government's decision to cut UK Border Force staff by 18% over the next three years combined with the £2.5m spent on new immigration uniforms is beginning to come under fire as queues at border control amount.
The immigration minister has laid out some plans to cope with the crisis, including a new central office to co-ordinate and rapidly deploy staff where queues are developing.
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