Travel Chaos Returns As Long Queues Form At Dover Ahead Of Easter Weekend

Dover has been blighted by travel chaos again as long queues were reported at the major port linking the UK with continental Europe.

Last weekend, a political row kicked over the thousands of people who were delayed at the Kent travel hub, reportedly by up to 14 hours.

The delays were blamed on French border officials carrying out extra checks and stamping UK passports following Brexit, though home secretary Suella Braverman dismissed the link to leaving the EU.

On Thursday, ahead of the long Easter weekend, queues of “approximately 90 minutes” for passport checks were reported by ferry operator DFDS.

The queue had eased by 1pm, with DFDS saying “traffic is free flowing through border controls and check-in”.

Port officials said they held a “urgent review” with ferry operators and the French authorities in an attempt to avoid a repeat of last weekend’s delays.

Ferry companies are asking coach operators booked on sailings on Good Friday – expected to be the busiest day for outbound Easter travel from Dover – to “spread the travel” across the three-day period from Thursday to Saturday.

Additional “temporary border control infrastructure” has also been installed.

A general strike in France in a row over pension reforms is also causing disruption.

Last Sunday, Bravermandenied that Brexit was to blame for the travel chaos at Dover.

The home secretary instead urged holidaymakers stuck in huge queues as they try to get to France that they need to “be a bit patient”.

Appearing on Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News, Braverman rejected comments by Doug Bannister, the chief executive of the port at Dover, who said that the “post-Brexit environment means that every passport needs to be checked”.

Ridge asked the home secretary: “Do we need to, after Brexit, just get used to this happening at busy periods?”

Braverman replied: “I don’t think that’s fair to say this has been an adverse effect of Brexit.

“I think we’ve had many years now since leaving the European Union and there’s been on the whole very good operations and processes at the border.

″What I would say is that at acute times, when there is a lot of pressure crossing the Channel, whether that’s on the tunnel or ferries, then I think that there’s always going to be a backup and I just urge everybody to be a bit patient while the ferry companies work their way through the backlog.”

HuffPost UK has reported ministers turned down a bid by the Port of Dover for funding to build more passport booths.

Officials at the port applied to the Cabinet Office for £33 million from a special infrastructure fund in 2020.

The cash would have paid for “additional French passport control booths to compensate for slower transaction times and a reordering of controls within the port” following Brexit.

But a press release issued by the port in December 2020 says that “at the eleventh hour the port [was] offered just one tenth of one per cent of what was needed”.