The rescheduling of arriving aircraft has coincided with similar rescheduling in respect of departures, thus limiting the extent to which Immigration staff can be redeployed to deal with the arriving passengers. additional workload is in practice being met by a substantial increase in workload per officer, as the following figures illustrate :
The
Workload
Year (millions passengers)
Operational establishment
Workload per officer
1982/83
7.5
471
15923
1983/84
7.8
471
16560
1984/85
8.5
471
18046
1985/86
8.7
412
21116
A value for money study conducted in 1984 suggested a reduction of 59 posts (from 471 to 412) in the 1985-86 operational establishment of the Immigration Department. The study found that the policy objective of processing passengers within 30 minutes could generally be met with the reduced establishment. Although the Department did not agree with the
the findings the Director of Immigration nevertheless accepted
accepted the reduction since these posts had already been redeployed by him within the Department to meet urgent needs in other areas.
20
To cope with a steady increase in workload since 1985, particularly during peak periods when waiting time for passengers may exceed 30 minutes, provision has been included in the 1986-87 Estimates for 22 additional posts at Kai Tak, representing an increase of staff strength by 5.3%. Given the continuing increase in passengers, this will not be enough to enable him to restore the service at the Airport to the level in 1984/85 when 471 staff were available to handle 8.5 million passengers; but is the best he can do taking into account budgetary restraints and the need to allocate resources to meet other demands of even higher priority.
21
As regards clearance at customs counters, the bunching of arriving passengers due to the recent rescheduling has not created notable problems as the volume of passengers proceeding to customs counters is to
to some extent regulated by the necessity to clear immigration first. The situation will be closely monitored but in no circumstances must standards of inspection be sacrified to facilitate a quicker flow of passenger traffic through customs.
Short term improvements
22
In the absence of enough additional staff to deal with peak hour traffic, the Immigration Department has introduced the following short-term
to reduce the length of queues at immigration counters:
measures
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