Changing Culture, Strengthening Delivery

Home Office / Border Agency: IRIS Border Control System

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Transcript

Caption:  Using technology to improve services

 

FEMALE:

Hi sir, good afternoon, what can I do for you?

 

MALE:

Can I sign up for IRIS, please?

 

FEMALE:

You certainly can. Can I take a look at your passport, please?

 

IAN NEILL: Project Executive IRIS

IRIS was really born out of a need that sprang from two areas, one, was rising passenger numbers, and, two, was restricted accommodation and our ability to process people efficiently and securely through the control.

 

MALE:

What I want you to do is look in to this screen here. Where you see the blue screen, two green dots will appear, and just line up the green dots with your eyes.

 

KATHRYN FOSTER: Head of Border Force Operations,

Terminal 5

We were quite clear on what the benefits would be from the IRIS system right from the start, and we engaged with staff on that basis, demonstrated to them the benefits that would be available, and talked them through the process that passengers would have to go through in order to register and be eligible to use the system itself.

 

IAN NEILL:

What we wanted was a meeting of minds around the art of the possible on the ground, with the art of the theoretical from the techies, because there’s often a big credibility gap there, and by bringing these people with operational hard nosed experience together with the technical team are you able to sort of move through some of the crunchy issues and come up with a solution that you might not have originally thought was doable.

 

MARTIN DAVIS: Immigration Officer

I think it’s been a good thing. The central idea to it is it’s taken people out of the queue that needn’t be there because they’ve already been assessed, so we can concentrate on the people that might be more of an immigration risk.

 

KATHRYN FOSTER:

We’ve had very good feedback from passengers using the IRIS system itself, a good take-up, and people are very keen to use new technology for border crossings. They see it as an enhancement to our security procedures, and from staff as well, a very positive response in seeing that we haven’t actually replaced staff with machine technology.

 

UYI AGBONTAEN: Immigration Officer

As part of our job we have to assess whether people qualify for IRIS in the first place, and whether they’re suitable to not see an immigration officer, but use an automated barrier by themselves to enter the UK, so we were very involved in the actual enrollment process, which we still do today.

 

IAN NEILL:

The latest figures show that we’ve had 1.8 million crossings from the IRIS barriers, so that’s 1.8 million people who’ve not had to undergo an interview with the border force officer because we have already screened them. And for people who bring a lot of value to the UK economy being able to transit the border rapidly and efficiently, and yet knowing it’s secure is a key element in deciding whether they do business with us or not.

 

KATHRYN FOSTER:

Publicity is key for passengers. One of the things that we’ve had to do is to make sure that the enrollment stations were visible, that we’ve been able to staff and open those when passengers have been able to enroll, and key is making sure that the IRIS machines themselves and the technology in use has actually been up to the necessary required standards.

 

MARTIN DAVIS:

The feedback that I’ve had from the traveling public is that they really love it. It saves them time, they don’t have to wait in queues, it’s easy, quick to use, and they’re through in no time at all.

 

KATHRYN FOSTER:

There is an enthusiasm and an appetite amongst the traveling public to use this new technology and we need to take that forward and build on that.

 

UYI AGBONTAEN:

It’s definitely lessened the amount of passengers that we see on the European channel, and obviously using new modern technology at Immigration is exciting stuff.

 

IAN NEILL:

What it’s done is it’s opened our eyes to that there are different ways of managing a complex border. We know there are those that we can regard as very low risk, and we actually want to facilitate their passage as a matter of sort of almost seamless plane to baggage, and for us there’s real sense of yes, that’s how we should be doing things, we want to focus on those in who we have a legitimate and heightened interest.

 

End of Transcript

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