If you travel to Dublin through Heathrow Airport, as I do frequently, you must now pass through five separate security checks. Five.

Most of them involve snaking queues and the usual sprinkling of brusqueness and barked instructions. When you finally make it to the gate, you are liable to be held up for another 20 minutes because when a plane arrives, they pull sliding doors across the concourse to create an enclosed passage for the arriving passengers. If your gate is on the far side, tough. 

On the arrivals front, I came in to Terminal 3 recently and saw a queue of at least 300 metres for the non-EU passport desks (which were only 70% manned). I reckon that was a three-plus hour wait. Welcome to Britain.

Before anyone accuses me of indifference to security and international terrorism, I fully acknowledge the need for strong security at airports.

Doubtless all of the measures were introduced after careful consideration and to address a particular risk.

But I don’t see why the customer has to be so poorly treated in the process. What’s missing is any sense of putting the customer first, and this has hugely affected the way the measures are operated and the resulting impact on passengers.

There are lessons here for us, because similar processes happen in retail, even if they have less draconian results. We all understand the importance health and safety, hygiene, security, cutting shrinkage, and so on. All good management teams discuss these matters regularly, and most retailers of any size have specialists responsible for them.

But it can start to go wrong in two ways. First, the agenda can fall entirely into the hands of specialists, whose primary focus is often their risk prevention duty and not the customer impact.

A good example is customer returns. At both Hamleys and Our Price I came upon processes clearly developed in response to some ghastly fraud. As a result, all customers were treated as fraudulent until proven otherwise. Security managers were happy, as fraud decreased, but the businesses lost badly because the ill-will created massively outweighed any cash saved.

The other problem is that, having installed all the processes or controls the business actually needs, specialists don’t stop there – they go on developing new things in response to ever more obscure risks. 

The resulting tangle of rules ties up valuable shopfloor time and often gets in the way of sensible retailing. An example from Superquinn was a great new deli product we launched recently. It came in with four days’ shelf life. But the application of three separate rules cut this to one day. The result? 90% of the product was thrown away as waste and we discontinued it.

So next time you are debating your health and safety policy, or loss prevention, take note of the law and of good practice – but make sure the customer is in the room too.

➤ Simon Burke is chairman of Majestic Wine and Superquinn