Actions have consequences

There will be a brief hiatus in blogging for the next few days as I head off to Poland for some family schmoozing.  Joy of joys, we shall be flying through Heathrow, so I'm already having palpitations at the thought of coming home to face the fearsome queues that are now a daily feature of the LHR experience, thanks to a shortage of staff at the UK Border Agency.  

Big queues at Heathrow immigration desks are nothing new. A few years ago I came into Terminal 4 in the early morning from Amsterdam. No more than a 40 minute flight, but it saw us arriving in the midst of all the overnight flights from North America, Africa and Asia.  I made it through reasonably quickly, but my Australian colleague was there for a lot longer.  How much longer? Well, I took the train to Paddington, waited for a taxi, went across town to the City, lined up for a latte at Starbucks and then went into the office.  Once at my desk, I called his mobile, and he was just reaching the front of the immigration queue!  

The difference now is that the line-ups seem to be a direct result of government cutbacks: thanks to budget reductions at the Border Agency, there are simply not enough staff to open all of the immigration desks.  You have to wonder if anyone in the government is pondering what this means.  All the rhetoric a couple of years ago was about how wasteful spending would be cut and "frontline services" protected, yet here we have a simple example of how reduced spending translates directly into degraded service -- and with the Olympics just three months away, this could scarcely be happening at a more embarrassing time for the government, or for the country.

Motoring organisations have moaned for years about how the amount spent on roads is a small fraction of the amount the government collects in license fees and fuel taxes.  Something of the same thing now seems to be happening with air travel.  The UK has the highest airline passenger fees in the world, yet the amount spent on ensuring that the experience of travelling through British airports is at least tolerable is shrinking steadily.  There are lots of good reasons why driving and flying should bear a disproportionate tax burden; however, conservatives more than other politicians should be alive to the danger of voters seeing a growing disconnect between what they pay for and what they actually get in return.