Not Giving Up on a Change.

Lots of people travelling back into the UK this summer will know that queuing at Border Control can take a while. It can be one of the few times a year millions of us interact directly with a central Government service. Mixed with flight delays, heat, alcohol and the end of a holiday, it might be a negative one. Queues at airports continue to be a source of frustration.

My recent experience was different as my family were able to use the passport gates and got through in a few minutes. It was particularly nice for me as I got to benefit from one of my old projects. It’s one that I had forgotten about (partly as it wasn’t digital).

The lessons learnt and challenges.

Firstly. Everyone told me that this project couldn’t be done.

It was 2014 and I had just returned from a Five Country Conference. There was nothing glamorous about this, it had been an intense week in a very cold Ottawa, where I had shared the UK’s plans to develop Registered Traveller as a way of improving security and getting regular travellers through the border quicker.

It was also a way to link up with the other countries, share ideas and find ways to collaborate on border control (which led to another project that allows UK nationals to join US Global Entry). And I also got to talk about how the UK was leading the way with its Digital work, adoption of the cloud and agile approach, led by the Government Digital Service (GDS).

The piece of work had been a side conversation, in that both Australia and New Zealand shared details of how they were lowering the age for using their passport gates.

In the case of the UK, you had to be 18 or over to use the passport gates. As the parent of teenagers it had been a bugbear of mine. Knowing that the technology was moving fast, that the next generation of passport gates would work for 12+, were being installed in large numbers, that the ongoing queues and operational pressures at airports were growing, it felt like this had to be changed.

Excluding those aged from 12–17 also means that the whole family group queue to see an Officer as the families tend to stay together. At busy airports this can make a big difference, especially in school holidays.

So despite already having far too much work and a number of projects, I wrote to some of the board members and asked the question, should we look at this?

My optimism was quickly balanced with the reality of a complex area such as border control and the difficulty of balancing different needs. There are lots of issues being managed at the border, including Child trafficking and there were a lot of concerns about taking this idea further.

Not giving up, my next question was, well why can’t we at least test the principle and restrict it to UK nationals? The scenario of a UK citizen trying to smuggle a UK child back into the UK is unlikely. And we were also developing a number of other safeguards.

The EU won’t allow it.

The response back from a number of people was that we wouldn’t be able to do something just for UK nationals. This would go against EU policy.

Ok, is this the point when you stop?

Anyone that has worked in large and complex organisations knows that this is normally the point in which you give up. But then too often this is why things don’t change and the public at large are none the wiser.

In this case giving up seemed wrong. So after more pestering, permission was given to get some legal advice, which in fact stated that there was nothing stopping a test to limit this to UK nationals.

The rest of the project was relatively straightforward. The team navigated through all of the steps, policy approvals, submissions and permissions from Ministers, change requests to the IT team managing the gates, new features on the control screens for the gates, operational guidance, operational instructions, working through the risks and putting mitigations and additional safeguards in place in conjunction with lots of stakeholders, testing, and then a controlled proof of concept at some airports. And then a detailed evaluation, more advice and recommendations, further changes, and finally an operational implementation.

Hopefully some of you will benefit from using the passport gates on your travels. My lesson learnt is that you sometimes have to keep pushing an idea and initiate the change even when those around you say it can’t be done.