Dover ferry passengers urged to arrive early amid fears of disruption all summer

Cross-Channel ferry passengers are urged to arrive in Dover on time as queues pile up at the Port of Dover amid fears the severe disruption of recent days could return to Dover Kent throughout the summer.< /p>

Ferry operator DFDS told passengers there were queues of around an hour for French border controls on Monday morning and to "allow a minimum of 120 minutes before your departure to complete all controls".

P&O Ferries tweeted: Waits have piled up and it takes about an hour to get through passport control."

Holidaymakers had to queue until 11 a.m. this weekend with the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss accusing France of running out of passport control staff, but others blaming red tape caused es by Brexit.

The Port of Dover however are confident they can cope and the weekend has been a nightmarish combination of a fivefold increase in the number cars and a lack of French passport control staff on Friday morning which resulted in a huge backlog of cars trying to access the ferries.

Last weekend is usually the busiest of the year, but this is the first year since Brexit the impact of additional passport checks could be seen due to lower passenger numbers during the pandemic.

< p class="dcr-xry7m2">Dover said it handled 11,000 cars on Friday compared to 2,000 the equivalent weekend last year. On Saturday the numbers were just under 12,000, compared to 2,400 on the equivalent day in 2021, and on Sunday the port handled 10,000 compared to 1,900 in 2011.

The port said it had anticipated the huge rise in numbers, which is also happening at airports across the UK and the rest of the world.

It had provided nine passport booths for car numbers with a triage system also giving priority to tourists over carriers. But on Friday, only six of those counters were occupied due to a shortage of French passport control officers. This was corrected on Friday afternoon, but by this point the queue was already "out of control", a Dover source said.

Monday, No 10 played down the suggestion that Brexit was to blame for the travel chaos and called on France to only carry out "sensitive" border checks.

The door -Boris Johnson's official spokesperson said a 'combination of factors' led to people queuing for hours over the weekend, including a lack of staff at France's border controls, an accident on the M20 and "exceptionally high" travelers leaving for their summer holidays.

"These are not scenes that we believe are necessitated by leaving the EU" , have i ls insisted, adding that the situation had improved – with waiting times at Dover down and freight backlogs “mostly cleared”.

"Our objective now is to work with our French counterparts and others to avoid any repeat of what we have seen over the weekend," the spokesperson said, adding that it was up to France "to decide how carrying out border checks".

Toby Howe, senior highways manager at Kent County Council and tactical manager for the Kent Resilience Forum, said the queues of Queues in Dover were "normal for a Monday morning".

However, there are fears that the queues could recur next weekend, one of the busiest popular all year round for holidaymakers.

Howe told BBC Radio 4's Today program that next weekend was likely to be "very c loaded". He said: 'It's the second busiest getaway weekend of the summer holidays. As we have just found out the weekend has just passed, traffic across the English Channel has returned to pre-pandemic levels and with increased controls it is slower to get through so very much is needed little to cause these traffic jams. »

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