The biometric checks, which will be required at all external EU borders with third countries like the UK, are expected to be introduced in the autumn following years of delays, with travellers’ data remaining on file for three years.

Dan Jarvis, Labour’s shadow Home Office minister for security, pressed minister for legal migration and the border, Conservative MP Tom Pursglove, on the issue in the House of Commons on Wednesday (8 May) following the more than four-hour eGate outage on Tuesday evening (7 May).

"Can the minister give a guarantee that full preparations are in place at Dover to avoid queues when the European entry and exit checks are introduced in the autumn?" Jarvis asked.

In response, Pursglove said "an enormous amount" of cross-government work was ongoing to ensure the UK has "the best possible plans in place" for the introduction of EES, as well as "thorough engagement" with French and EU counterparts. "We have made real progress in recent weeks, and we will continue to sustain that effort," he added.

The Home Office confirmed the outage was reported shortly before 8pm on Tuesday and was resolved not long after midnight. However, the failure of the UK’s network of more than 270 eGates left thousands of passengers arriving into the UK waiting hours to clear passport control.

Issues were reported at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester and Newcastle airports, forcing Border Force officials to manually process arrivals. There was disruption too at other ports where there are no eGates, such as Belfast International airport, pointing towards a wider network issue affecting Border Force.

Advantage Travel Partnership chief Julia Lo Bue-Said has called for greater investment in the systems that underpin international travel and "robust" contingency planning to mitigate such outages.

Lo Bue-Said said with travel "increasingly reliant" on technology, particularly systems "designed to speed up previously sluggish processes" such as manual border checks, it was vital there were sufficient redundancies built into these operations.

"eGates enable the UK to improve border control as they allow for a smooth, much faster border experience," Lo Bue-Said said. "The incidents with ePassport gates at UK airports highlights the fact that if we are to rely heavily on technology, there needs to be sufficient investment in the technologies used in travel to ensure that these systems run smoothly and robust contingency plans in place to avoid unnecessary disruption."

’Six-minute response’

Addressing the House of Commons on Wednesday (8 May), Pursglove said the incident was caused by "technical issues within the Home Office network" to which engineers responded "within six minutes". He stressed that at no stage was border security compromised, and that there was no evidence of "malicious cyber-activity".

Despite a slew of arrivals taking to social media to post images, footage and first-hand accounts of the up to three-hour delays they faced, Pursglove said the queues "remained manageable and within health and safety parameters", with arrivals supported by ground staff whom he praised for their response, and that the delays "were necessary to maintain the integrity" of the UK border.

"I realise that it will have been frustrating for all those affected," Pursglove continued. "I offer my thanks to passengers for their patience [and] I sincerely apologise for the disruption that occurred."

Pursglove added an investigation was already under way, with efforts to establish exactly what went wrong and how the outage with handled ongoing. "I will be unswerving in our determination to ensure every possible lesson is learned and that this does not happen again," said the minister.

Like Pursglove, Jarvis also paid tribute to the efforts of airport ground staff and Border Force officials, as well as the passengers "who waited patiently for hours". However, he branded the "chaotic scenes" at several UK airports "unacceptable" and highlighted similar failures in recent years.

"The system collapsed at the start of the late May bank holiday weekend in 2023 because of a failed system upgrade, and technical issues in 2021 caused the gates to fail three times in two months," said Jarvis. "That is unacceptable and brings into sharp focus how the current high-capacity eGate system is no longer reliable enough."

Jarvis said that while the minister had made clear the fault was technical rather than malign, it was nonetheless incumbent on the Home Office and Border Force to "make every effort to ensure that any such technical issues do not expose vulnerabilities in the system that could be exploited by our adversaries".

He pressed Pursglove on whether the same technical issues responsible for previous eGate failures were a factor in the latest outage and whether the country’s contingency planning for a national eGate failure worked on this occasion. "There cannot be another repeat of the chaos seen at Britain’s border last night [Tuesday]," Jarvis added.

Pursglove said "overall, the contingency plans did work last night" and were robust. He also told MPs he had been assured the technical team responsible for the eGates system "were confident there is now a permanent fix" to the issue that caused the outage.