Eurostar could be forced to limit passenger numbers travelling from St Pancras each day under post-Brexit plans to bring in biometric border controls later this year, the owner of the station has warned.
HS1, the owner and operator of the line and stations between London and the Channel tunnel, has raised concerns that planning for new Entry/Exit System (EES) checks at the London rail station are “severely inadequate”, and would lead to long delays and potential capping of services and passenger numbers.
The EES requires citizens from outside the EU or Schengen area to register before entering the zone.
This will replace the stamping of passports for UK travellers, and instead require passengers to enter personal information and details about their trip, as well as submitting fingerprint and facial biometric data.
It has been mooted that the new checks will come into force in October but the implementation has been delayed several times in recent years because the infrastructure was not ready.
HS1 has now raised several concerns to MPs around St Pancras’s ability to accommodate the changes, predicting “unacceptable passenger delays”.
It said only 24 EES kiosks had been allocated by the French government, despite modelling suggesting that nearly 50 would be needed at peak times.
In evidence to the European scrutiny select committee, it wrote: “We are told that the proposed kiosks are ‘optional’ as the process can be delivered at the border, but without about 49 additional kiosks located before the current international zone [at St Pancras] there would be unacceptable passenger delays of many hours and potential capping of services.”
It predicted that with just 24 kiosks, Eurostar would be unable to process all passengers, particularly at the morning peak, and this could “lead to services having to be capped in terms of passenger numbers”.
Eurostar runs about 14 trains to Paris from St Pancras a day, with each train carrying up to 900 passengers.
HS1 has said space restrictions at the Grade I-listed St Pancras building would make the EES difficult to implement and that a lack of space would mean the queueing process would be “convoluted and staggered”.
In its own evidence to the committee, Eurostar said kiosks would create new queues and a more complex flow management that would represent a “higher risk for the delivery of the timetable and the growth of rail transport from St Pancras”.
It suggested this would add “two to three minutes” to the time taken to process travellers through the border, significantly higher than the 45 seconds it now takes, and could lead to queues of over an hour at peak times.
Any extra kiosks at St Pancras would need to be funded by Eurostar, at about £25,000 a kiosk, with the operator also paying an expected £2m in operation and maintenance costs for all of the kiosks each year.
The Eurostar chief executive, Gwendoline Cazenave, said she hoped the authorities would allow most of the process to happen in advance online, rather than entirely under the supervision of border police.
The concerns over delays at St Pancras, the country’s main Eurostar terminal, mirror those of port operators and local authorities.
Last week, Ashford borough council, which has the M20 running through its area, told the committee 14-hour queues were “a reasonable worst-case” scenario if the scheme was implemented as planned.
The Port of Dover has also suggested reclaiming land from the sea to allow it more space to process the EES border controls.
In its evidence to the committee, Eurostar called for an “emergency brake mechanism” to be established, which could be triggered by politicians if the EES led to permanently longer queues and traffic.
It also suggested the EU and UK consider bespoke agreements, which would mean UK nationals being exempted from the collection and verification of biometric records.
Last January, Eurostar was forced to cap passenger numbers for several months due to border police being unable to process passports quickly enough.
In some cases up to one-third of the 900 seats were left unsold on services between London, Paris and Brussels, because the company could not deal with post-Brexit rules that required each UK passport to be stamped. The cap was fully lifted in October last year.
• This article was amended on 7 February 2024 to remove an incorrect reference that Ashford borough council is “responsible for the area around the Port of Dover”. The area is the responsibility of Dover district council.
