The e-Borders Programme has engaged with carriers from its inception, and continues to have ongoing consultations with the industry. A regulatory impact assessment was undertaken between August and October 2007, in which carriers had the opportunity to highlight the costs that would fall to them in connection with discharging their e-Borders obligations.
The programme has developed a wide range of methods to enable the carriers to transmit data to the e-Borders system. These have been created to align, as far as possible, with industry standards and current data transmission methods.
This allows carriers to continue to use systems already in use for transmitting data to other countries who collect passenger data, e.g. US and Spain, and has minimised the need to develop new systems.
Other passenger information (OPI) is known in the airline industry as passenger name record data and relates to details collected for a carrier’s own commercial purposes. It may include information such as passenger’s name, address, telephone number, ticketing information and travel itinerary.
There are currently no plans to collect OPI data for every passenger movement; however, it will be collected incrementally over five years to reach a maximum of 100 million passenger movements by the end of December 2013.
Currently, e-Borders obtains and processes advance passenger information (API) provided by carriers. This includes details available from travel documents such as a passport and scheduled departure and arrival information.
The e-Borders Programme remains on track to meet the milestone of capturing 60 per cent. (equivalent of 120 million passenger movements) of all passenger movements by December 2009.
The long-term vision of the UK Border Agency is to establish the capability to automatically deny authority to carry (ATC) at the point of check-in to certain categories of individuals seeking to travel to the UK. The e-Borders programme will provide the ATC capability.
There will be a manual trial period to assess the benefits, impact and costs for the ATC capability. Following this trial, consideration will be given to the funding required.
The total cost of the other passenger information (OPI) element of the e-Borders contract is £89,025,118.