Whose job is it to keep airport e

Martin Vander Weyer

Do you hate airport e-gates? Me too. The instructions are poor, the facial recognition frequently fails and the ‘Don't abuse our staff’ posters tell you you’re trapped in a system that's bound to annoy. Last Saturday it went from bad to worse, when all 270 e-gates at UK entry points stopped working. ‘A technical nationwide border system issue’, the Home Office called it. But I think we should know who's responsible – and a Hollywood-hacker-style trawl has led me to a 2021 report by David Neal, ‘independent chief inspector of borders and immigration’.

Neal reveals that a single-supplier contract for UK e-gates was awarded in 2013, until 2023-24, to a Portuguese firm called Vision-Box. ‘Home Office colleagues’, says Neal, ‘believe it's highly unlikely the UK-wide estate would ever suffer an entire outage’ but procedures are in place ‘to escalate (and resolve) service failures… to Vision-Box’.

Confusion as to who's in charge of e-gate upgrades, including removal of ‘legacy data systems’, may be another part of the story. One such transition, from an old watchlist (for wrong ’uns trying to enter the country) called Warnings Index to a new one called Border Crossing, is in the hands of none other than Fujitsu – the Japanese giant responsible for the faulty Horizon software that led to hundreds of prosecutions against innocent sub-postmasters. Fujitsu has continued to win huge government contracts, notably from HMRC, since the Horizon scandal, despite calls from MPs for the relationship to be paused.

If the Home Office will provide full detail on the e-gate outage, we’d all like to hear it. All I can say so far is that I don't think it can be blamed on British workmanship.

In our first issue of this year I made fun of a Telegraph piece headed ‘Why house prices will nosedive in 2023’. They won't, I predicted; they will merely lose a slice off the top of the post-pandemic price spike – and if I was wrong, I’d eat my Christmas paper hat. For once, I was bang-on. According to Nationwide, by April prices were steadying after falling just 4 per cent from their peak, taking them back to the level of February 2022.

And parts of the market have not even dipped. According to Halifax, new-build house prices show a 3.5 per cent year-on-year rise, while first-time buyer prices are also up as it becomes increasingly cost effective to buy rather than rent. Nationwide again: ‘People's views of their own financial position over the next 12 months [have] improved markedly… if inflation falls sharply in the second half of the year… this [will] likely further bolster sentiment, especially if labour market conditions remain strong.’

In short, most grown-ups are well capable of assessing their own circumstances and seeing beyond panic headlines. And one of the year's smartest deals may be Carphone Warehouse tycoon Sir Charles Dunstone's takeover, for £1 plus its debts, of the online estate agency Purplebricks – whose shares collapsed in midwinter gloom. Dunstone aims to merge Purplebricks with a smaller rival, Strike, to create the ‘Aldi or Ryanair’ of estate agency. Meanwhile I’ll buy a straw hat for a cheerful summer.

More next week on the possibility of a £50 billion ‘growth fund’ aimed at investing in hi-tech UK companies and funded by consolidating smaller pension funds that stand accused of holding back the economy by being too risk-averse. The concept has gained support from Jeremy Hunt, City minister Andrew Griffith and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, who even hinted she might make participation compulsory.

But credit for launching this rocket goes to the Lord Mayor of London, Nicholas Lyons – and you may have read it here first, in August, when he outlined it to me while he was still mayor-in-waiting. For such a bold idea from a ceremonial office to have gained traction so quickly is quite an achievement.

John Allan is the 74-year-old grandfather who has stepped down as chairman of Tesco, Barratt Developments and Imperial College London after the Guardian published allegations that he had touched two women's bottoms, one at a Tesco meeting, the other at a CBI dinner. He denies both episodes (and Tesco found nothing after an ‘extensive review’) while admitting he once told a colleague at another CBI event that ‘your dress really suits your figure’ – for which he says his later apology was accepted.

Let's agree that any workplace remark by an older man about a younger woman's figure is dangerously out of order these days; all the more so if made in the environs of what we now think of as the sexual snake-pit of the CBI, where Allan was president. But the guillotining of his career without process, even when he was close to retirement, is also well out of order and an unjust precedent. If he's a serial groper, let evidence be brought forth even though sentence has already been passed. If he isn't, I hope he sues the Guardian and wins a handsome figure.

By way of an antidote to news of half-baked Downing Street ideas about capping inflated food prices, I’m staying focused on my quest for value-for-money eating out – which this week took me on an online pilgrimage to Jeremy Clarke's French village of Cotignac.

Our late Low Life columnist ‘had a bit of a phobia’ about restaurants, especially posh ones, his widow Catriona says – ‘something to do with his father being strict about table manners’. But in February he took his grandsons to the Café de l’Union, which does rabbit stew or fish and chips for €18, and when he was well enough he enjoyed the lovely Jardin Secret's gastronomic three-courser for €53. Hardly a bargain, but in the spirit of Jeremy – hell, why not?

Subscribe today to unlock a month's worth of free access to our website and app. After your free trial, it's just £1 a week. You can cancel any time.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Martin Vander Weyer

Topics in this article