Airport boss disappointed by liquids rule change
The chief executive of Birmingham Airport has said he is "very disappointed" with changes to rules for liquids in carry-on baggage.
The airport had been allowing passengers to leave bottles of up to 100ml in hand luggage and not remove them for checking thanks to hi-tech scanners known as Next Generation Security Checkpoints (NGSC).
But on Friday, following a government announcement on liquids, passengers travelling from Birmingham now have to remove such items once more and also face an unspecified delay to plans there to raise limits to 200ml.
Nick Barton said the situation passengers found themselves in was "not what we planned to give them".
The new scanning tech had meant that some UK airports with the provision had already increased to 200ml the hand luggage limit on liquids including gels and aerosols.
While Birmingham Airport had upgraded to the equipment, it kept to the original 100ml limit, putting it down to “an outstanding regulatory approval" on the new screening machines. Passengers, though, did not need to remove the content from carry-on.
But on Friday, the government announced a return to rules predating the tech.
It said the 100ml restriction was being reintroduced at the six regional sites that had relaxed the rule to "enable further improvements to be made to the new checkpoint systems" and was not in response to a specific threat.
When asked by BBC WM how long he thought the government's switch would stay in place, Mr Barton said: "We have to plan for [the preceding process] not coming back within the next few days."
Transport Secretary Mark Harper said the reintroduction of restrictions was to allow “changes” to be made to the scanning equipment.
“It's a temporary measure and we’ll set out when that can be reversed in due course,” he told the BBC.
Mr Barton said Birmingham Airport had spent £60m on new security checking equipment after the government told major airports to have it in place by 1 June.
He called it a "fantastic bit of infrastructure" that should result in "huge benefits to speed".
Once fully operational, he said it would allow passengers to leave containers carrying up to 200ml in their bags.
He added that in the meantime, about one in six passengers going through security in Birmingham were generally not following procedures over liquids and that slowed down the checking process and led to longer queues.
He said he was asking all passengers to "help themselves" by ensuring there were no bottles of 100ml or more inside their cabin bags.
To cope with delays he said the airport had "deployed a huge amount of human resource in the terminal" to speed up the security process.
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