I have several issues with yesterday's proposal from the Home Office that passengers are offered the chance to pay extra to skip immigration queues at British airports, not least of which
is the question of whether or not it is right that the application of
legally-required controls such as immigration and security should be
differentiated in this way.
My bigger concern, which a spokesman has already tried to play down, is that
surely if you have a “premium fast-track”, don’t you need to have a slow
track too?
If immigration can use the fees as a way of reducing its costs, there would be
no incentive to improve the speed at which “non-paying” passengers went
through passport control. Indeed my fear would be that the standard “free”
service would simply be allowed to deteriorate in order to increase the
number of paying customers.
It’s a sort of Ryanair approach to raising revenue - reduce the basic service
to a minimal level as a way of “persuading” as many passengers as possible
to pay for better service and added “extras”. Call me a cynic, but I just
can’t see it working in any other way.
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