Fly into Manchester airport any time over the next six months and you could be invited to take part in a Home Office trial. Tucked away in a corner of Terminal 1’s immigration hall are five brushed-steel-and-glass facial-recognition gates, and they’re the future of immigration.

The Home Office has decided that passport checks by human employees of the UK Border Agency (UKBA) are old-fashioned and inefficient, and what we really need is intricate equipment and complicated software to do the same job.

Never mind the government’s track record with technology, think about the cost savings: a single UKBA employee can supervise five or more facial-recognition gates from a central-monitoring station, thus freeing fellow passport-checkers for other duties, such as shelf-stacking at Tesco (unions last week promised to strike in response to the new technology).

What is important to the public, though, is cutting the time we spend queuing at immigration, so we can spend more time waiting at the luggage carousel. The new technology promises to do just that, but only if you hold an e-passport - the new one with the biometric data stored on a chip.

Only 12.6m Britons have these, so the facial-recognition option is not available for 80% of us - including the home secretary, Jacqui Smith - although that number will decrease as new passports are issued. You must also be over 18.

I passed that test, so I became one of the guinea pigs last week. It works like this. First, I approach a glass gate, where a screen displaying a silent animation - cleverly designed to explain the procedure to all nationalities - instructs me to slide my passport into a slot.

The technology presupposes that since I’m not a child and I’ve somehow succeeded in acquiring an e-passport, I must, therefore, be mentally competent to follow these instructions. So there’s no animation explaining “Lengthways, not widthways, Dummkopf”. I have to work that out for myself.

There is an animation for “Now you’ve put it in upside down, estu-pido”, but since it looks like an instruction to make a U-turn and rejoin the queue, you can imagine the confusion that follows.

“There’ll be a member of staff on hand to help passengers,” says the Home Office reassuringly. Probably someone quite capable of glancing at my passport and saying, “Welcome home, sir.” But back to the facial-recognition gate. Having succeeded in placing my passport in the slot, I now wait while my biometric record is retrieved.

Then the glass gate opens, I step forward into what looks like a shower cubicle and another animation, showing shuffling feet, asks me for a dance. Actually, it doesn’t. The cartoon means “Place your feet on the foot-shaped markings on the floor, imbecile, and look at the screen. Not that screen.

This screen. THIS SCREEN. Jesus wept.” This is the bit where I’m expecting a fine mesh of laser beams to scan my face, digitally mapping my physiognomy like it does in all those sci-fi flicks, but this is Terminal 1, not Terminator 3, and all I get is a dull click as the machine takes my picture. Then another gate opens and I’m over Britain’s e-border without as much as a “Welcome to Blighty”.

Manufacturer Fujitsu claims a 3-in10,000 failure rate, saying neither wigs, fresh scars nor newly sprouted facial hair can fool the electronic eye - no worries for Amy Whitehouse, then - and at last week’s trial, the fastest time through the gate was 28 seconds.

The slowest was one minute and 40 seconds, while the human passport-checkers next door were churning out arrivals at a rate of one every 10 seconds. The trial ends in January and, if judged a success, the Home Office says “significant numbers of passengers” will be “using automated clearance” by 2011.

If it weren’t for all those pesky, bleary-eyed, jet-lagged passengers fumbling with their passports - the same ones who cause all those security queues - things would really speed up.

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