Following a new trial, UK tourists may soon be able to cross the border without grabbing their passports.
According to Phil Douglas, director-general of the UK Border Force, new high-tech airport gates will recognise visitors to the country using cutting-edge face recognition technology.
“Much more frictionless facial recognition than we currently do will be used to construct an intelligent border.”
With the deployment of this new technology, the government intends to raise our border to the level of locations like Dubai, which employs facial recognition for fifty different nationalities.
The smart gates at Dubai Airports are said to enable travellers to clear immigration processes “in as little as five seconds.”
The announcement follows several instances of confusion caused by technical malfunctions at UK border crossings in recent years.
Tens of thousands of travellers had to wait in line for up to four hours at airports due to a systems upgrade that went wrong over the late May bank holiday weekend in 2023.
The Home Office intends the ETA to be implemented for all visitors to the UK who do not need a visa for short stays, including European nationals.
Mr Douglas said: “We will know a lot more information about people upfront. We will know if they’ve been in the UK before. We’ll know what their compliance with immigration laws is. And we’ll know if there are any records of them on our security systems. So there will be some people who won’t be getting on the plane.”
Despite a huge backlog of applications, passport authorities received an average of £2.1 million in incentives last year.
9,609 incentives totaling £2,105,225 were given out last year, despite the fact that a watchdog found 360,000 individuals had to wait longer than the intended 10-week period to receive their passports.