Travel expert Simon Calder doesn't think there will be the same "total shambles" this week at the Port of Dover after a weekend of delays caused mainly by passport checks. Some Welsh schoolchildren were forced to wait up to 18 hours to cross the Channel for school trips after a weekend of chaos.
The queues eased in the early hours of Monday morning, but it is estimated that around 20,000 people were affected by the delays over the weekend and they were mainly teenagers on trips with schools. Read about the experiences of Welsh schoolchildren here.
Dover MP Natalie Elphicke said: “It’s not a Brexit issue. It’s been the same for many years.” But Mr Calder, who writes for the Independent, said "not everyone agrees" and warned that travellers should expect capacity restrictions for future peaks with less space and higher fares. However, he doesn't think there will be the same delays over the Easter bank holiday weekend. You can get more traffic and travel news and other story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.
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Explaining the main reason for the delays, he told BBC Radio Wales: "The crucial thing about Dover being the main port of exit from the UK is that we have juxtaposed border controls. That means that French passport officials will actually check everybody into France.
"Normally, that is great and means you get to Calais or Dunkirk and off you go. However, since Brexit, what the UK signed up for was to become third country nationals. This means that everybody's passport that used to be generally waved at a French official and moved on needs to be examined. They need to see how many days you have spent in Europe in the past six months, it has to be stamped and that multiplies the amount of time it takes to process one person, one car, one coach. The contingency plans had been put in place. There were more coaches than expected and there was a bit of bad weather but all-in-all it was a total shambles."
He described it as "dreadful, dreadful" scenes but didn't think they would be repeated this weekend, adding "The main problem was always going to be the start of the school holidays as it is the last possible week you can go skiing, so lots of schools were racing down to the Alps. That won't be repeated this coming weekend."
Speaking about the future, he said there could be caps and pointed out that most Eurostar trains ran a third empty because they couldn't sell all the seats as "they can't accommodate all the passport checks that we requested when we left the EU".
Home Secretary Suella Braverman rejected suggestions that Brexit could be the cause of delays at the port as passengers endured long queues and cancelled trips. Ms Braverman said it would not be fair to view the delays as "an adverse effect of Brexit".
She told Sophy Ridge On Sunday on Sky News: "What I would say is at acute times, when there is a lot of pressure crossing the Channel, whether that's on the tunnel or ferries, then I think that there's always going to be a back-up and I just urge everybody to be a bit patient while the ferry companies work their way through the backlog."
She suggested that, in general, "things have been operating very smoothly at the border".
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