Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Monday the 22nd of April, which I am sorry to say means that it is just one week

before the next planned strike at Heathrow. And in the past half half hour we've also been told about a second

unrelated strike so let me tell you what is happening and what the likely effects will be

the strike that we know about will be a four-day strike from the 29th of April to the 2nd of May.

It involves more than 300 members of the Public and Commercial Services Union,

more crisply known as the PCS, who are working for UK Border Border Force and the dispute is about new rosters

which the union says would see around 250 Border Force staff forced out of their jobs at passport

control. I've asked of course to the Home Office for a response to that. I've not got one yet,

but let's press on with what we know. If 300 members of UK Border Force, who would normally be

checking the passports of people arriving at Heathrow. Of course, there are no

outbound checks. If they were to walk out, well, you would imagine that cues would start to build

up. But nobody can predict exactly what's going to happen. And when have for instance in December 22 a set of

strikes right across the UK it didn't actually have a significant effect what we had

then was military personnel civil service volunteers They were trained to replace the staff who

normally checked the passports of arriving passengers. They couldn't offer the same level of service.

They were mostly simply checking that my passport matched me and effectively passing the

low risk passengers straight through.

It's possible also that new minimum service-level legislation could be used.

That would require a certain proportion of union members to work.

I think that's unlikely.

It has been kind of tested once on the railways, the LNER,

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