This page explains why we collect information about passengers before their journey and how it may affect you when you travel to and from the United Kingdom.
Every year, more than 200 million passengers cross the United Kingdom border. To help secure the border, we now use an electronic system called e-Borders to count passengers in and out of the country.
Our checks begin before a passenger even starts on their journey, allowing our officers to identify those who shouldn't be in the United Kingdom or who intend harm.
Passengers simply provide their carrier with information from their passport or travel document at point of booking, and the carrier then provides e-Borders with passenger and crew details in advance of travel.
The intelligence gathered helps law enforcement agencies to identify illegal immigrants, terrorist suspects and known criminals before they can do harm. To do this effectively, we need to check all cross-border travel.
e-Borders has already allowed us to check more than 104 million journeys made by passengers before they travelled, resulting in more than 3,700 arrests.
You can find out more about the system and how we tested it on our
e-Borders pages.
At the moment, owners and operators of fishing boats and pleasure craft (for example yachts) and light aircraft do not have to provide information to e-Borders, but we expect to start activating a trial programme with them in 2010. For more information about this, and details of the requirements that carriers will need to meet, see
e-Borders requirements for carriers and ports.
