Manchester Airport: Councillor says queues due to management failure

A "failure of management" is to blame for the recent "chaos" at Manchester Airport, a councillor has said.

Passengers have faced long queues for check-in and security throughout March at the site, which is partly owned by Manchester City Council.

Councillor Pat Karney, who met airport bosses earlier, said they plan to make changes, but had also informed him of several issues he was not aware of.

He said they needed to "level with the public and tell them the problems".

Manchester Airport has previously apologised for delays and said staff shortages and sickness had put operations "under extreme pressure".

It said 400 new recruits would be starting at the airport in April.

Mr Karney had called for the meeting between the management and the shareholders of the airport, which include the nine other Greater Manchester councils and an investment company.

He had earlier said the airport's reputation was "nosediving" as passengers queued for hours in order to catch flights.

The meeting heard about the problems with recruitment and delays caused by bags being rejected by security because they contained items like hand sanitisers, he said.

However, he said the management had "totally underestimated the recovery time of the airport".

"Two million people went through the airport in February [and] in the previous year, it was 70,000, so you had to plan ahead," he said.

"They should have seen all this. They should have known the recovery was going to be very quick."

He said the airport had put together a "six-point plan that they are going to publish quite soon", but its bosses needed to "spend money to get out of this, in terms of attractive wages and conditions", and communicate more with passengers.

"Level with the public and tell them the problems," he said.

"We've had the apologies. We want action."

He added that the issues were unlikely to be totally solved until the summer and "to be brutally honest, we're going to have delays and queues over Easter".

Manchester Airport's managing director Karen Smart said she recognised that passengers "are really looking forward to getting away, and long queues are clearly not what they want to see".

She said as travel restrictions had been lifted, demand had surged back and passenger numbers, which had "more than doubled in the last two months", were set to "grow further in the run-up to the summer".

"The extensive security checks and training for new security officers mean we've not been able to keep pace with the rapid growth in demand - but we are interviewing hundreds of candidates every week and new colleagues are coming into the operation every day," she said.

She said she wanted to be "clear with our customers" that getting back to full strength would "take time", and over the next few weeks it may take "longer than it should" to get through the airport.

Passengers could "definitely help us by arriving in good time and ensuring they know exactly what they can and can't take through security", she added.

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