20-mile diversion or five-hour queue: New Dover EES farce for UK holidaymakers

Plans to avoid holidaymakers getting stuck in hours-long queues for post-Brexit border checks at Dover or the Eurotunnel this summer could involve driving to a different site, 20 miles from the port.

Entry-Exit System (EES) checks were suspended by French authorities at Dover last weekend after passengers were trapped in their cars in traffic jams of more than five hours in sweltering heat.

It has raised fears in Kent that EES biometric checks will cause summer travel mayhem when millions of holidaymakers pour through the town.

At its recent annual meeting, Kent County Council (KCC) heard how disruption at Dover and the Eurotunnel can already lead to delayed ambulances, fire engines stuck in traffic, missed hospital appointments and children unable to get to school.

French border checks are carried out on British soil at Dover and Eurotunnel’s “juxtaposed” ports. But KCC is now demanding government action and additional funding to manage EES delays.

A 2024 analysis by the Kent and Medway Resilience Forum (KMRF) suggested traffic caused by EES checks was expected to be much worse than the queues of more than 14 hours seen in summer 2022.

To avoid this, the council is backing a motion for drivers to be diverted to the Sevington Inland Border Facility on the M20 in Ashford, Kent, 20 miles from Dover, which already operates as a border and biosecurity checking site for Heavy Goods Vehicles.

Antony Hook, Liberal Democrat KCC opposition leader, said the sight of passengers stuck in huge queues from EES at European airports since it launched in October was a “terrifying preview” of what may be in store for Kent, where a “massive, unpredictable wave of tourist traffic flows through our county every single summer”.

“I’m very, very concerned,” he told The i Paper. “You are going to have a horrendous impact on holidaymakers, but also on local traffic for people getting caught up in those delays, not being able to go where they need to go.

“And with the weather like it is at the moment, you’re looking at potentially serious public health risks of people being in cars for more hours than they expected, not having water, not being able to get toilet facilities, not having food, getting hot.”

When The i Paper visited the port town this week, people living their shared their frustration at the congestion caused by delays at the crossing.

Chris Ryan, 72, said: “My granddaughter works for Border Force and she was saying one couple were stuck for five-and-a-half hours [on Saturday]. They had children as well in the car. Terrible.

“No drink, no food. For the people of Dover, you can’t move, it’s gridlocked.”

Mark Castle, 64, who has been caught in queues caused by port delays, said: “It’s no fun at all. Absolutely hideous. Especially in weather like this.

“Stuck in a car for any length of time in this weather is murderous.”

Christine Cumberland, 62, who lives in nearby Deal, said: “Especially if it’s hot and you’ve got kids in the back, they get really frustrated, a bit testy, and they get tired and irritable.”

Mick Cuffe, 72, said: “Dover’s going to become a huge car park.

“If they can scrap this now, which they are doing, to get people through, they can scrap it totally.”

A Liberal Democrat KCC motion, which received rare cross-party support at the Reform UK-led council, is calling for port traffic to be diverted to the Sevington facility, which opened in 2021 and has been used to carry out checks on goods going in and out of the UK since Brexit.

The £154m site has capacity for around 1,700 lorries with Border Force officers carrying out custom checks and Ashford Port Health inspecting meat and dairy products.

Hook suggested border checks on tourist traffic could also be carried out at Sevington in order to minimise disruption.

“That might provide some relief if the French frontier police were able to do the checks up there,” he said.

Currently, EES facial and fingerprint scans are still not being carried out on Dover car passengers due to problems with French border technology, with police manually opening a file for travellers instead.

A source said there was still no indication when the issues would be fixed – and doubted whether the facial and fingerprint scans on car passengers would be in effect before autumn.

When The i Paper visited Dover in October port authorities said the biometric checks on car travellers would take six times longer, with an estimated processing time of six minutes per car compared to up to a minute for manual passport stamping.

At the port’s Western Docks, 72 kiosks built to carry out the car checks are yet to be used due to the French IT issues.

This week, building work was still ongoing at the site, where coach passengers undergo EES before the bus is sealed and drives to Eastern Docks three miles away for another check by French border police.

Operation Brock, the M20 freight-holding system deployed when pressure builds on Kent roads, has also led to long delays, with fears of EES and Brock combining to inflict more pain this summer.

EES had turned what were once smooth journeys into sources of “chaos and delay”, said Lib Dem councillor Mike Sole at KCC’s annual meeting.

“With summer holiday traffic just around the corner, the risk of gridlock is real and predictable,” he said.

In Dover, Janet Daniels, 80, and her friend Heather Auger, 84, from Croydon, south London, who were holidaying in Folkestone had seen Saturday’s queues on the news.

“I think they introduced EES too quickly. They should have done it over a few years.” said Ms Daniels.

Her friend, Heather, said: “I don’t think I could have stood there all that time, I’m not young, so I don’t think that would have suited me at all.”

Lee Hathaway, 52, who lives near Dover castle, said he could see cars clogging up the town’s arteries during Saturday’s traffic problems – but said congestion happens every year.

“We’ve become a choke point,” he said.

“We’ve got two major motorways converging on one port. Dover’s just being left as no one really cares. It’s the last place that anyone ever sees.”

A spokesperson from KCC said: “We recognise the concern around delays, particularly given that full biometric checks for car passengers are still to be introduced.

“This does raise questions about what peak summer travel could look like.”