The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-10)

The Sunday Times April 10, 2022 17

Cancellations

because of staff

shortages and

long queues at

check-in and

border control

are causing

passenger

anguish this

Easter holiday

At Manchester airport, more than

2,000 people lost their jobs; at Stansted

nearly 400; and at Gatwick 1,500, or

40 per cent of the workforce.

As travellers surge back, our airports

are simply unprepared to serve them.

WHAT ARE AIRLINES AND

AIRPORTS SAYING ABOUT IT?

Bosses argued that, in the absence of

government aid during the pandemic,

they had no choice but to make

redundancies. But as restrictions were

lifted and travel restarted, little effort

was made, it seems, to replenish the

ranks. The speed with which demand

would return to pre-pandemic levels

had been widely predicted. Full capacity

would be reached by summer 2022,

easyJet said in January. “Late 2023”,

said Boeing, while the International Air

Transport Association predicted that

passenger numbers would match those

of 2019 in 2024. As early as January 25

Balpa, the pilots’ union, warned the

government of Easter disruptions

because airlines were not prepared to

meet the surge in demand.

HELL

really shocked me

that they had no

contingency plan

and the attitude of

all the staff was a

combination of rude,

dismissive and defeatist,”

he said. “It was one of the

worst customer service events

I have ever seen.”

WHY ARE THE QUEUES SO LONG?

While queues are predominantly

outbound from the UK, that is likely to

change in a week or so when

those who waited for hours to

leave the country come back in.

Much of the blame falls on the

unreliability of the e-gates at

immigration. About 270 are

installed at 15 UK airports, and

while technical issues can affect

their operation, the usual cause

of delays is a lack of staff to monitor them.

There have been repeated complaints

that the queues of people who cannot

use the e-gates move faster than those for

something designed by the government

“to enable quicker travel into the UK”.

Lucy Moreton of the Immigration

Services Union says that it’s not a

temporary problem. “Border Force is

significantly understaffed,” she says. One

issue is salaries, which according to her

are simply not attractive enough. “The

lack of staff — combined with increased

staff sickness through Covid, and other

operational demands such as small-boat

migration and the need to support visa

services in countries like Poland — results

in far fewer staff on the Border Control

at large airports. Not only does this result

in increased queueing times for inbound

travellers, it also seriously reduces our

ability to control illegal importation of

goods or to collect duty payable.”

WHEN WILL IT GET BETTER?

In an open letter published on Friday

an apologetic Charlie Cornish, chief

executive of Manchester Airport Group,

told passengers to arrive three hours

before flights, warning that the 90-minute

security queues could last for “the next

few months”. As Manchester city council

ordered its workers to help the airport to

find staff, aviation experts concurred that

there would be no quick fix.

“There are three factors driving the

issue,” said John Grant, chief analyst at the

travel data provider OAG. “First, there’s

Covid; it could be mid-May before the

current wave of infections has gone

through the industry. Second, the security

clearances; this is at least a two-month

problem and maybe longer. Third, the

workforce; people who left the industry

have found better lives in other roles, so

we’re at the point where we perhaps need

to incentivise workers from overseas to

fill the gap — and that’s a problem which

will persist through the summer.”

Grant warns that the situation could

get worse before it gets better. “The

UK’s aviation industry is still only at

around 80 per cent of its pre-Covid

capacity, so with potentially 20 per

cent more flights and passengers

looming, we need to fix the current

issues quickly,” he said.

Fixing the problem will inevitably

lead to higher airfares as airlines raise

landing fees and ancillary costs to recoup

their expenses. “Airports will soon realise

they need to pay more to attract the

workers they need, and if costs go up,

then prices go up,” said Rob Morris,

global head of consultancy at the

aviation analyst Cirium. “And wage

inflation is still to come. Jobs are being

advertised at 2019 rates, but as the cost

of living increases, so staff are going to

need more money. It’s going to be tough.”

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With cancelled flights costing airlines

millions in refunds and compensation

and understaffed airports cracking under

stress, recruitment is key to survival. But

attracting workers is complicated by the

referencing and security vetting process

— which takes a minimum of 14 weeks —

and by the low salaries on offer.

A baggage screener earns £10.72 an

hour at Manchester airport, and security

staff checking hand luggage and patting

down passengers start on £12.04 an

hour. Check-in agents’ jobs at Gatwick

are advertised at £9.93 an hour. EasyJet

doesn’t publish the starting salary for

its cabin crew, but the jobs website

Glassdoor reports a basic wage of

£9,084 a year.

By way of comparison, Holland-Kaye

earned £2.6 million in 2019, and Karen

Smart, the Manchester airport chief

executive who stepped down last week

as her airport melted down, was paid

£2.5 million.

“We warned the aviation sector

repeatedly not to use the cover of Covid

to slash jobs and pay,” said Sharon

Graham, the Unite union’s general

secretary. “This would render it unable

to meet demand when passengers

returned. Now the sector is suffering

from a chronic inability to attract new

staff because workers are not attracted

to an industry where pay is poor and

conditions are lousy.”

WHY IS BRITISH AIRWAYS HAVING

SO MANY TECHNOLOGY ISSUES?

Separate to the staffing crisis are the IT

issues blighting BA’s schedules this year.

In February nearly 500 flights were

cancelled because of IT failures, and at

the end of March a second outage —

affecting operational systems ranging

from check-in and flight management to

stand planning and crew rostering —

forced more delays and cancellations.

BA has been coy about the causes,

confirming only that the problem was not

caused by a cyberattack, but it has form

for costly IT failures. In 2018 the personal

data of 420,000 customers and staff was

leaked in a breach that cost the carrier

£20 million in fines. In July 2018 a

glitch hit short-haul flights, and over

the May bank holiday in 2017 some

750,000 passengers were affected by

computer failures that forced the

cancellation of more than 700 flights.

Analysts have long speculated that

the problems were the consequence of

outsourcing IT management as a

cost-cutting exercise by the former chief

executive Alex Cruz. And with BA working

to move all storage to the cloud, further

IT calamities cannot be ruled out.

At present it’s optimistic to expect any

assistance from BA customer service in

the event of a cancellation, as thousands

of passengers have found out. Arthur

Ledley was a victim of the IT failures. “It

EasyJet reduced

its workforce by

30 per cent — or

about 4,500 jobs

across Europe