May to ease airport passsport controls Controls will come under even greater strain next Thursday when Border Agency unions take part in a one-day strike. Simon Buck, the chief executive of the British Air Transport Association, met Mrs May on behalf of airlines including British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and easyJet. "We were told that for the longer term the Government will be looking at taking a balanced approach using technology and assessing risk as a factor in clearing passengers," he said. This is something we would welcome and want to engage with the Government to be part of developing this. We have invested in technology which allows you to take a risk-based approach. Such an approach would allow officials to adopt a lighter touch for some passengers, such as parties of schoolchildren from members of the European Economic Area - the EU plus Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway - and Switzerland. This would mean that they would not be checked against a terrorist warning list. Immigration officers could be given discretion over whether to subject EEA passports to a full electronic scan. They estimate that the requirement to scan every passport adds up to 15 seconds to the time needed to clear each passenger. The Home Office declined to comment on a "private meeting." Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP for Newark, criticised the move. If this is accurate this is extraordinary. We are now back to where we were under the Labour government. What we need is more equipment and more staff," he said. BAA, Heathrow's operator, piled further embarrassment on Damian Green, the immigration minister, yesterday with figures that showed that delays were far worse than he had claimed in Parliament. On April 30, when Mr Green told MPs the longest waiting time at Heathrow was 90 minutes, the immigration queue at Terminal 4 reached three hours. The figures showed the Border Force at Heathrow failed to meet its own performance targets nearly every day last month. Non-EEA passengers, who should have spent no longer than 45 minutes waiting to clear immigration formalities, faced bigger queues on 21 days out of the 30. The Border Agency's IT system has collapsed under the volume of use. Andrew Tingley, an immigration lawyer at Kingsley Napley, said it was "beyond farcical" that rules requiring non-EEA nationals to have a biometric residence permit had left it unable to cope.