French delays mean Dover's £40m EU check site unlikely to open in time for summer holidays, port chief admits

By DAVID BARRETT, HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR Published: 15:20, 23 June 2026 | Updated: 15:29, 23 June 2026 Delays by the French authorities are likely to prevent the Port of Dover’s new £40million passport check facility opening in time for the summer holidays. Port operators said the border processing centre for car passengers was ready to go, but French police have yet to switch on the European Union’s computer kiosks. Chief executive of the Port of Dover, Doug Bannister, said it had done ‘absolutely everything’ it could to prepare for the EU’s ‘Entry/Exit System’ or EES. But it ‘most probably’ will not open for the summer season. No date has yet been set by the French border agency, the Police aux Frontieres, to turn on the kiosks, he added. It raises the prospect of queues forming at the port during the school holidays while the new facilities stand idle. They were built on land reclaimed from the sea and feature space for 600 cars with 84 kiosks for passengers to process their fingerprints and photographs in the EES system. Cars and lorries queue at check-in to cross the Channel at the Port of Dover in Kent in April, before the EU's new Entry/Exit System requirements came into force Mr Bannister said the port was working closely with the UK and French governments to ‘make certain that the summer runs smoothly’. But there was ‘no certain outlook’ for when the kiosks - a mile from the ferry terminal at the Eastern Docks - would become operational. Since April 10 this year the EU has required non-EU citizens to enter their biometric details in the EES system before entering the bloc’s free movement zone, known as the Schengen area. There have been huge queues at some European airports, with passengers missing flights as a result. Travellers through Dover are currently required to complete partial EES 'profiles' which do not include biometrics, while the computer terminals are unavailable. But during the May half-term holidays, port operators were forced to get EU bureaucrats to agree to suspend the system as major queues built up.  At that point travel through the docks was running at 8,000 cars a day - and during the summer the UK's busiest ferry port is expecting between 11,000 and 13,000 a day. It means there is a high risk of border chaos if EU and French authorities have not solved their technology problems, believed to be due to software glitches in the EES kiosk computers. There could also be congestion in and around Dover port as vehicles move from the Western Docks - where the EES site is located - to the ferry terminal at the east of the site. Kiosks at the Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone are also currently not operational. An EU spokesman said the EES was working well and ‘any exceptional situations can be - and are being - addressed with the flexibilities and fall-back procedures foreseen by EU law’. Vehicles queue for the Port of Dover along the A20 in Kent in May last year, before the EES was brought into force He added: ‘It is up to member states to ensure the proper implementation of the EES on the ground.’ The EU will launch a further layer of bureaucracy for travellers in October. It is due to launch the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (Etias), which will be linked to the EES. This will require passengers to pay a £17.25 (20 euro) fee for a three-year permit to enter the Schengen area. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. Your details from Facebook will be used to provide you with tailored content, marketing and ads in line with our Privacy Policy.