Why is a landing card required at UK border control?

score:13

Accepted answer

Wikipedia gives the reason here.

The Secretary of State may by order made by statutory instrument make provision for requiring passengers disembarking or embarking in the United Kingdom, or any class of such passengers, to produce to an immigration officer, if so required, landing or embarkation cards in such form as the Secretary of State may direct, and for requiring the owners or agents of ships and aircraft to supply such cards to those passengers.

Hence the reason at the moment is that it's the law, though the form of providing the information could be modified by statutory instrument at any time. The US did something similar with their I-94 forms a few years ago and made them all electronic. However, you still have to fill in a customs form when entering the US so it makes little difference unless you have Global Entry or use the mobile passport application.

You can read the whole act here and the specific section to do with landing cards here.

The purpose of them was explained in a freedom of information request:

Landing cards fulfil the following functions:

  • to provide statistical information for use both inside and outside the department;
  • to provide a record of the arrival in the UK of persons subject to control; and
  • To enable the immigration officer to record what a passenger has said to him/her on his arrival, the circumstances which led to the granting of leave to enter and any information which may be useful to caseworkers if the passenger subsequently applies for an extension of stay.

Upvote:14

Almost every country in the world requires a landing card. (Some also require exit cards.) One answer as to why might be "because it's the law" but an "ask why 5 times" spirit could ask "Why is it the law?" You seem also to be asking "why hasn't it been replaced with something electronic?"

Every country asks slightly different things. Some are questions that are important to protect the agriculture and economy of the country:

  • have you been on a farm recently? Are you planning to visit a farm?
  • are you coming here for business, tourism, or study?
  • what is the value of the goods you are bringing into the country?

Some are questions that can be used for statistical purposes:

  • what is your profession?
  • are you planning to (list of tourist activities)?

These are not things that can just be looked up in some giant online database of people and cross referenced against the plane's passenger list. If they don't ask you, they won't know. And they want to know.

I suppose you could try asking passengers to install an app and take a survey electronically, but airports especially are full of folks who left their phone behind because it won't work in the destination country, or who used up all their battery during the flight, or other issues that would no doubt require a paper backup anyway. Cards are easy to keep stacks of on planes and at counters in the airport, easy enough to fill out, and officers can add notations to them quite simply. In Canada the way they made it electronic is to write software that scans the cards, not to replace the cards with something electronic.

A tip if you feel pressured filling your card out - take a spare and take it home with you. Before your next trip you can fill out that vast majority of it in advance. When they hand you the blank one, that's for the trip after that - take out your prepared one and just fill in the last bits. I do this for US trips where I have to preclear in Canada - they don't give you the card until you're about to join the lineup so I like having one at home I can fill out in advance.

More post

Search Posts

Related post