Cross-Channel ferry passengers are being told to arrive in good time at Dover as queues build at the Port of Dover amid fears the severe disruption of recent days could return to Kent throughout the summer.
The ferry operator DFDS told passengers there were queues of about an hour for French border checks on Monday morning and to “allow a minimum of 120 minutes before your departure to complete all controls”.
P&O Ferries tweeted: “The queues have picked up and it is taking approximately one hour to clear passport control.”
Holidaymakers faced queues of up to 11 hours over the weekend with the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, blaming France for shortages of passport control staff but others blaming red tape caused by Brexit.
The Port of Dover is confident, however, that it can cope and that the weekend was a nightmare combination of a five-fold increase in car numbers and a lack of French passport control staff on Friday morning that resulted in a huge backlog of cars trying to access the ferries.
Last weekend is typically the busiest of the year but this is the first year since Brexit the impact of extra passport checks could be seen because of the decline of passenger volumes during the pandemic.
Dover said it handled 11,000 cars on Friday compared with 2,000 on the equivalent weekend last year. On Saturday, the numbers were just under 12,000, compared with 2,400 on the equivalent day in 2021, and on Sunday the port handled 10,000 compared with 1,900 in 2011.
The port said it had planned for the huge rise in numbers, which are also being experienced in airports in the UK and the rest of the world.
It had made nine passport booths available for car numbers with a triage system also prioritising tourists over hauliers. But on Friday only six of those booths were staffed because of a shortage of French passport control officers. This was rectified by Friday afternoon but at that stage the queue was already “out of control”, said one Dover source.
On Monday, No 10 played down the suggestion Brexit was to blame for the travel chaos and called for France to only conduct “sensible” checks at the border.
Boris Johnson’s official spokesperson said a “combination of factors” had led to people queueing for hours over the weekend, including a lack of French border control staff, a crash on the M20 and “exceptionally high” travellers heading off for their summer holidays.
“These are not scenes that we think are necessitated by leaving the EU,” they insisted, adding the situation had improved – with wait times at Dover falling and freight backlogs “largely cleared”.
“Our focus now is on working with our French counterparts and others to avoid any repeat of what we saw over the weekend,” the spokesperson said, adding that it was up to France “to decide how to carry out checks at the border”.
Toby Howe, the senior highway manager at Kent county council and the tactical lead at Kent Resilience Forum, said the queues at Dover were “normal for a Monday morning”.
However, there are fears queues could build up again next weekend, one of the busiest of the year for holidaymakers.
Howe told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that next weekend was likely to be “very busy”. He said: “It’s the second busiest getaway weekend of the summer holidays. As we’ve just found out the weekend just gone, traffic numbers travelling across the Channel were back to pre-pandemic levels and with the increased checks it is slower to get through, so it takes very little to cause those tailbacks.”
On what the rest of the summer could bring, he said: “It’s a very vulnerable situation, it takes very little to cause further issues.”
One of the causes of the delay over the weekend was the need for British passport holders to have their passports stamped. Sources at Dover say this increased the average checking time for each car from about 58 seconds to 90 seconds.
While Brexit came into force in January 2021, the impact on tourism to the continent is only becoming evident as post-pandemic passenger numbers return to normal volumes.
Port authorities said they processed 72,000 passengers by Sunday morning after bumper-to-bumper traffic stretching back for miles made for a miserable start to people’s summer holidays.
John Keefe, the director of public affairs at Eurotunnel, said one of the problems was the poor quality of the roads in Dover. Before the M20 was built, drivers used the A2 but this was never upgraded to a dual carriageway.
“It needs to be improved so that we can split the traffic between the two routes. And then that takes the pressure off when there is a mixture of passenger and freight,” he told Radio 4.
He also said the gridlock could be alleviated if more hauliers chose Eurotunnel’s rail services.
