London, 18 February 1971
Personal
I attach an official reply to your letter of 4th February about segregation at ports. 1
When I discussed this letter with the Home Secretary he suggested that I might mention to you separately that when Mr Jenkins came to the Home Office he expressed similar views on this subject to those recorded in your letter, and as a result a two-week experiment in desegregation was made at London Airport. The result was an unprecedented volume of protest from passengers—particularly, though not exclusively, United Kingdom nationals. To quote just one example, the Chairman of the Airline Operators Committee (who was from Pan American) wrote:–
’The Airline Managers of No. 1 Building Europa reported a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation and as a Committee we must record a request that such an experiment should not be repeated. During the experiment many passengers were forced to wait for more than 40 minutes for passport examination and so cancelled out the advantage of air travel on short journeys. The long delays caused inconvenience to all and brought complaints from British, Commonwealth and Foreign passengers’.
United Kingdom nationals are accustomed to passing through the immigration control without any significant wait. This is only possible by singling them out in some way from the other passengers whose examination must take substantially longer. The letter below gives the average time for examining passengers a minute. Averages are a risky guide to immigration procedures but a crude example may give some idea of how desegregation affected United Kingdom passengers. (There should, in theory, be no effect on the time taken to deal with Commonwealth and alien passengers). If one assumes a planeload of 100 passengers, half United Kingdom and half Commonwealth or alien, with five immigration officers to deal with them the average waiting period for each United Kingdom passenger, if there is no segregation, is just over five minutes and for the last United Kingdom passenger in the queue, just over 10 minutes. Under the present system whereby one of the five immigration officers deals with all United Kingdom passengers, the average waiting time for each United Kingdom passenger would be 1¼ minutes and no United Kingdom passenger would wait for more than three minutes. The difference matters most at times of peak pressure or unusual congestion when delays tend to build up. Barring a very substantial increase in the number of immigration officers one cannot abandon segregation without substantially increasing the waiting time for United Kingdom passengers.
1 Document 327.
[UKNA: PREM 15/442]