UK and France boost border staffing to avert summer EES travel chaos
Britain and France are deploying extra border police and spending £20 million on new checkpoints to prevent severe freight and passenger bottlenecks caused by the EU's new biometric entry system.
France and the UK have agreed to increase staffing at key border crossings. The move is backed by a £20 million UK investment in new infrastructure to prevent severe travel disruptions from the EU's new biometric checks.
The Entry-Exit System (EES), launched after the 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, requires UK passengers to provide fingerprints and facial scans when entering or exiting the Schengen zone. The EU has identified 20 "difficult spots" expected to suffer from the new requirements, widely thought to include the English Channel crossings. It has rejected requests from airports and airlines to suspend the system.
For the European travel and logistics sectors, the bottleneck poses a direct threat to the crucial summer tourism trade and cross-channel freight flows. During the May half-term, EES checks triggered four-and-a-half-hour delays at the port of Dover. Next weekend marks the start of the summer holiday season, with Dover bracing for 12,000 cars a day—more than three times the usual volume—and an overall 50% increase in vehicles this summer.
The operational strain is worsened by technical failures. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander informed her French counterpart, Philippe Tabarot, that the biometric kiosks intended to take fingerprints and facial scans are currently inoperable. While French border police can process coach and lorry passengers on UK soil, they are forced to manually register car passengers without biometrics while waiting for replacement tablets and kiosks.
To manage the surge, French border police will deploy additional officers to UK territory at Dover, Folkestone, and London St Pancras station to staff passport booths. A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said: “Heidi Alexander and her French counterpart agreed that high levels of resourcing at border points are essential to enable smoother journeys for passengers over the summer period.”
The UK government is using the funding to increase the number of passport check booths and reduce wait times. However, the urgency of the situation remains clear. “We saw for ourselves that there is going to be utter chaos next week unless the French authorities step up,” said Karen Bradley, chair of the home affairs select committee, following a recent visit to the port.
