Passengers on cross-Channel ferries were told to arrive in Dover on time as queues formed at the port of Dover amid fears the severe disruptions of recent days could return to Kent in the summer.
Ferry operator DFDS told passengers there were queues of around an hour for French border checks on Monday morning and to “allow a minimum of 120 minutes before your departure to complete all checks”.
P&O Ferries tweeted: “Queues have increased and passport control is taking around an hour.”
Holidaymakers faced queues of up to 11 hours over the weekend, with British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss blaming the French for a shortage of passport control staff, but others blaming red tape caused by Brexit.
However, the Port of Dover is confident it can cope and that the weekend was a nightmarish combination of a five-fold increase in car numbers and a lack of staff for French passport control on Friday morning, leading to a huge backlog of cars trying to gain access to the ferries.
Last weekend is usually the busiest of the year, but this being the first year since Brexit, the impact of extra passport checks can be seen due to the drop in passenger volumes during the pandemic.
Dover said it handled 11,000 cars Friday, compared to 2,000 the same weekend last year.
On Saturday, the number was just under 12,000, compared with 2,400 on the same day in 2021, and on Sunday, the port handled 10,000, compared with 1,900 in 2011.
The port said it had planned for the huge surge in numbers, which is also being seen at airports in the UK and the rest of the world.
It has provided nine passport booths for car numbers with a sorting system that also prioritizes tourists over carriers. But on Friday, only six of those booths were staffed due to a shortage of French passport control officers.
This was fixed by Friday afternoon, but by that stage the queue was already “out of control”, a Dover source said.
Toby Howe, senior highway manager at Kent County Council and tactical lead at the Kent Resilience Forum, said queues in Dover were “normal for a Monday morning”.
But there are fears that queues could pile up again next weekend, one of the busiest of the year for holidaymakers.
Howe told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that next weekend was likely to be “very busy”. He said: “This is the second busiest getaway weekend of the summer holidays.
“As we have just found out, just this past weekend, traffic traveling across the Channel has returned to pre-pandemic levels and with the increased checks it is going slower, so it takes very little to cause these delays.”
On what the rest of the summer could bring, he said: “It’s a very vulnerable situation, it takes very little to cause further problems.”
One of the reasons for the delay over the weekend was the need for British passport holders to have their passports stamped. Sources at Dover say this has increased the average inspection time for each car from around 58 seconds to 90 seconds.
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Although Brexit comes into effect in January 2021, the impact on the continent’s tourism will only become apparent when post-pandemic passenger numbers return to normal volumes.
Port authorities said they had processed 72,000 passengers by Sunday morning after bumper-to-bumper traffic stretching for miles made for an unhappy start to people’s summer holidays.
John Keefe, public affairs director at Eurotunnel, said one of the problems was the poor quality of the roads in Dover. Before the M20 was built, motorists used the A2, but this was never upgraded to a dual carriageway.
“It needs to be improved so we can split the traffic between the two routes. And then it eases the strain when there’s a mix of passengers and cargo,” he told Radio 4.
He also said congestion could be eased if more carriers opted for Eurotunnel’s rail services.
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