Thousands of people have faced a second day stuck in queues at Dover, as Suella Braverman denied post-Brexit checks were to blame for the chaos.
Despite extra sailings put in place overnight on Saturday, P&O Ferries said on Sunday afternoon that coaches arriving at cruise terminal 1 would likely face a total wait of over 10 hours.
Angry customers and parents of schoolchildren caught up in the delays, some of whom had their school trips cancelled as a result, bombarded ferry companies and the port, which declared a critical incident on Friday, with messages on social media.
As the government came under pressure over the situation, Braverman rejected the idea that they were linked to Brexit, although political opponents suggested she was out of touch with reality.
Speaking on Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday, the home secretary said operations at the French border had been “very good” since Britain exited the EU.
“I don’t think that’s fair to say that this has been an adverse effect of Brexit,” said Braverman. “We’ve had many years now since leaving the European Union and there’s been, on the whole, very good operations and processes at the border.
“At acute times where there is a lot of pressure crossing the Channel, whether that’s on tunnel or ferries, then I think there’s always going to be a backup. I just urge everybody to be a bit patient while the ferry companies work their way through the backlog.”
Later, speaking on the Laura Kuenssberg programme on BBC One, Braverman denied the situation at Dover would repeat itself and blamed “bad weather”.
But her comments variously attracted ire and ridicule. The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesperson, Alistair Carmichael, said: “These comments show Suella Braverman is in complete denial about the impact of the Conservative government’s botched deal with Europe on our borders. For Conservative ministers like Braverman, it is always someone else’s fault.
“Businesses and travellers are being tied up in reams of red tape but ministers are refusing to lift a finger. It shows the Conservative party is out of touch, out of excuses and should be out of power.”
The former Conservative cabinet minister David Gauke, who was stripped of the Tory whip for rebelling in a Brexit vote, tweeted: “If we were in the EU, the French would not need to do individual passport checks. If no individual passport checks, the process at Dover would be quicker. The Dover queues are, therefore, partly caused by Brexit. Not a contentious point, surely?”
Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, described Braverman as being “on another planet as usual”. She said that the home secretary’s comments regarding no Brexit link contradicted those expressed by the port’s chief executive. In an interview with the Observer a year ago, Doug Bannister, admitted Brexit was causing longer processing times at the border.
On Sunday, the Port of Dover said the continuing situation had been caused by a mix of lengthy immigration processes at the border and sheer volume of traffic, as it apologised to customers. Its Twitter account retweeted a post by P&O Ferries that said that coaches arriving at cruise terminal 1 would have to wait approximately four hours to complete an advanced passenger information border check and then face a further wait of six plus hours in the buffer zone before boarding a ferry.
Nicola Eslick, 51, from Brighton said her son’s school ski trip to Italy had been cancelled, approximately 14 hours after departing after the coach had queued all night on Saturday. She said she was “gutted” for her 14-year-old son as it was his first opportunity for such a trip because of Covid and the last before he started GCSEs. “I’m really angry at the authorities in charge of the borders,” said Eslick.
Her anger was echoed by other parents who messaged the port, P&O Ferries and fellow ferry company DFDS, expressing concern about children stuck on coaches for more than 12 hours without adequate food, water and sanitation. There were also complaints that delays were being downplayed and that coaches carrying children were not being adequately prioritised.
The shadow levelling up secretary, Lisa Nandy, put the delays down to the government’s handling of the challenges posed by Brexit rather than Brexit itself. “The government has known for a very long time that they needed to make sure that there were resources in place to deal with additional paperwork checks,” she told Sky News.
“The point is not whether we left the European Union or not. The point was that we left with a government that made big promises and once again didn’t deliver.”
