Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you.
Airports are in disarray, with the freshest hell involving some passengers being told they cannot fly from the UK’s main gateway, London Heathrow, due to a surplus of travellers and a shortage of staff. Many people understandably concluded that to sail over from Dover is the way to go: pack everyone into the car and speed off to the Continent – just as we did in the olden days when flying was prohibitively expense.
That plan began to unravel early on Friday morning, with queues building fast. By 7.30am the Port of Dover warned that holidays could be ruined – and accused French border officials of “woefully inadequate staffing”.
As the day wore on, families found themselves stuck in cars for many hours while local residents found it hard to make their way through the congestion that built up during the day.
At Dover on Saturday morning, I wandered through the massed ranks of stressed families to observe the root cause of the problem. The time taken for French border officials to process each car, in my experience, used to be measured in seconds, and at busy times no time at all – dozens of cars waved through to ease congestion.
The average per vehicle is now over one minute, entirely because of the UK’s decision to be subject to “Third Country National” rules after Brexit – which means that every passport must be inspected and stamped. Dover is now effectively an external border of the European Union. The problem will ease for the rest of the summer: Dover is by a mile the busiest port for holidaymakers, which is one reason the controls are “juxtaposed” and you enter France before you’ve left Kent.
The port has added infrastructure to expand the French border control point, but on Friday there were not enough Police aux Frontières (PAF) to prevent queues building quickly. The Port of Dover said: “We know that resource is finite, but the popularity of Dover is not a surprise.
“Regrettably, the PAF resource has been insufficient and has fallen far short of what is required to ensure a smooth first weekend of the peak summer getaway period.”
Even with every booth staffed, though, the sheer weight of traffic and bureaucracy combine to stifle any hope of a smooth escape.
At Newhaven, Portsmouth, Poole and Plymouth the checks are done at the French port on the other side of the Channel. Over the next few weeks, there will be “leakage” to other forms of transport – different ferry routes, airlines – and the problem will ease.
But the longer term concern is the EU’s long-planned Entry/Exit System (EES) which will require fingerprints and facial biometrics from all travellers from the UK to the European Union. The ferry firms genuinely don’t know how they will cope.
One of the travellers I met at Dover, Jo Washington from Sittingbourne, had turned up with a camper van, with her dog Chica the pug, five hours ahead of her booked sailing to France.
“I don’t think the government know what they’re doing at the moment,” she told me.
“The government need to pull their finger out.” But how much more satisfying for a prime ministerial contender simply to blame the French for the effects of Brexit. “This awful situation should have been entirely avoidable,” said Liz Truss. Yet what has made leaving the UK so difficult is leaving the EU.
