As a follow on, from the original thread about dover, Chaos in Dover

[Hawkins003]

Just that really, a thread for general thoughts and perspectives about the situation

Well it's up to them - they often put a spanner in the works pre-brexit but of course they are under absolutely no obligation to make it possible for travel between here and France to be smooth - they can make it just as hard as they wish.

Haven’t read the original thread so apologies if said before but in the interest of tackling the problem rather than assigning blame, surely the French could make exception to the individual passport checking for minors? I mean, what is the risk of kids spending more than the allotted days in the EU? Kids on school trips or holidays with family aren’t the ones likely to break the limits or try and stay indefinitely…this would surely have avoided/reduced the massive delays for school trips this week, which were really the source of the problem.

They do, and they did, but the UK government turned them down. They offered £40 million to build new infrastructure in Dover to speed things up. You can't blame the French for this!

https://www.ft.com/content/2a6662a0-975e-4bcd-9f5b-e241256db4df

I married someone from the EU and have spent the last 21 years driving from uk to europe via Dover or Folkestone, several times a year.

Before Brexit you would wave a burgundy passport and be waved through. Occasional random checks. Now each passport needs to be checked and stamped (me the Brit) or checked against a computer (Dh, dc) to make sure they have a right to remain in uk. As has been explained endlessly, this takes a lot longer and the UK gov refused to upgrade facilities at Dover which is a tricky hotspot anyway because of its geography, there is very limited actual space for expansion.

Hope this explains the situation for people who don’t use this border crossing.

As an aside, yesterday dh and dc flew to France, and sailed through passport control because of EU passports. We will drive less from now on because of delays at the Dover/Folkestone border.

You are comparing an airport with a ferry port. There is a difference

And so what if it is taking longer to get through Dover? France and places beyond Calais are not in any way dependent on British tourists. We are not special at all, even though many feel they are and the hubris is just unbelievable.

Malaga airport processes mostly EU/Schengen visitors, therefore their booths for non EU are never hugely busy. Dover processes visitors who are ALL non Schengen. That's the EU and them's the rules.

Good idea but there’s no incentive for The French to do this .

Fair point, well made.

@adulthumanfemalemum so Austerity ? But as usual they are more bothered about stoking the culture war...
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/border-force-faces-resource-spending-cut-theresa-may-confirms
https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2016/apr/01/border-staff-cuts-terror-attacks-immigration
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-border-agency-cut-staff-too-quickly-10475677

It kicks off at Dover all the time. In the past it has mostly been about industrial action by the French workers. And being smart strategists, they always find the worst time to do it.

Yes I'm sure Brexit adds some new problems/delays in terms of passport checking, but they aren't huge. Great get out to blame though by various other responsible parties. After all the ferry companies aren't exactly going to pass up the chance of a perfect faceless scapegoat.

Passport checks, I remember once at Dover being given a good going over long before Brexit. They went through every page in my passport, stopped on a few that had weird visas and had a conversation with me about each one. Then said to me that I must get a lot of hassle, to which I replied not normally I have two passports and I usually travel on the other one and they just waved me through. I've also been though Schipol in the last few days and went straight through without them so much as glancing at the photo ID, so not sure that they check everything ultra thoroughly, although airports obviously are a bit more controlled with respect to who is in them and where they are from in the various zones.

They may be a bit more thorough with kids because of events that have happened in the past, after all I'm pretty sure no parent on here would want the border authorities waving through kids at random without proper checks, and those checks take time.

I wouldn't go within 50 miles of Dover near a bank/start of the school holidays - just seems like a recipe for disaster to me.

I think the government wants us to forget Brexit, but good for Tobias for acknowledging it as per upthread. They blame anything and anyone but themselves: the weather/ migrants in their dinghies/ French bureaucracy/ French disdain for the Brits/ too many people going on holiday at the same time (😂)/ the ferry companies not laying on enough ferries…it’s a mass gaslighting exercise to attempt to escape responsibility for the pointless change that was Brexit.

Well - as Simon Calder pointed out - its not going to get any better.

From November the entry/exit system is due to come in to force. Fingerprints and photographs taken - and that data will need to be verified on subsequent visits.
Dover's chief executive has warned it will take up to 10 minutes to process a single car - whereas now its 90 seconds.

He's suggested they will have to do what the Eurostar has done to manage wait times by cutting capacity.
Eurostar has had to cut capacity by a third to manage the longer wait times.

It’d have been nice if people had thought about their DCs/GDC’s freedom of movement in 2016, rather than expect foreigners to care more about their kids now!

Yes, @QuentininQuarantino The key word in what you wrote is “thought”. Unfortunately many millions of people - including those in power who should know far better - didn’t think at all. What we saw over the weekend in Dover is one of the countless consequences of this lack of thought - and yes, it’s directly affecting our children, right now.

The reason this won't get resolved is denial.

Well done Tobias Ellwood. He's one of a few decent Tory MPs.

Bit on yesterdays thread instead of the Rory supporters arguing why this wasn't the fault of Brexit etc we actually had posters saying the the school children's fault for having parents who could pay for ski trips when we have a CoL crisis.

We've sunk so low as a country yet people still insist on racing to the bottom

I’m laughing at the idea of the delays at Dover being the fault of the kids themselves because their parents dared to be able to afford a ski trip during this CoL crisis. DARVO in action 😂

@GasPanic is it ok to blame the government ?

Wondering if @GasPanic has had a 12 year old on a 36 hour journey, including no contact for 8 hours yesterday, like some of us. Great news that your own trips have been so good recently, well done you! How fucking marvellous. For the rest of us, yes we blame this cluster fuck of a government for it. The French are too fucked off with us to do anything to help (can't blame them) and our government is too up its own arse to care.

From the last thread, which was very long. A reminder. Back in 2020, we knew this would happen once the implementation started kicking in. Yet there was no mitigation put in place.

Between this and the strikes at the passport office, good luck with getting on to the continent this year.

Yes I'm sure Brexit adds some new problems/delays in terms of passport checking, but they aren't huge

I don’t think that’s very accurate. With a coach full of people, having to check and stamp every passport will take a long time, certainly compared with someone just walking down the aisle and simply checking everyone is holding up a passport, like used to happen. It’s a couple of minutes versus an hour or so.

This. The French have spent a fortune upgrading the Port of Calais, they were doing it BEFORE the Brexit vote as it was long overdue, we have done nothing.

With any luck in a few years bills will be so high that nobody besides Tory MPs will be able to afford any kind of trips to France.
Problem will have resolved itself.

@CrotchetyQuaver

@RosesInWater makes one point why it's slower but also one of the main issues with Dover atm whereas before you waved through coaches of on average 50-70 people on each one, now each person has to get off and be processed individually which much slower both processing and for embarking.
Dover at Easter is the primary route for thousands of kids on school trips meaning more coaches than usual compounding the delays compared to airports.
The U.K. declined to invest in more infrastructure at the port to assist with this known problem following Brexit.
The French didn't change the rules, we did, so we can't really complain it's their fault in them making us comply with them.

The UK refusing to put money into Dover is very frustrating as it was a known bottle neck before Brexit...so now...this was a disaster in waiting. It will happen again at the next pinchpoint ie school holidays in July.

So ok we all know Brexit means a passport needs a stamp and when you have a coach, that's a lot of stamps. How can this be fixed?

What do we need to do?

Should we perform a time and motion study on the French to see how fast they process a coach. Then it needs to feed into the ferry companies so they dont overbook. Or a timing system put in place and coaches given a slot to turn up. Again, this feeds into how long the French take. If it's one coach per hour - it needs thinking about how many French are needed per coach. Lots to think about!

The best idea would be to invest in Dover to input more booths, but I dont live down there, so not sure why this has been rejected.

I find it so odd that there isn’t the planning in place for this. Surely it’s someone’s job to go - ok it takes X amount of time to process Y amount of people, therefore they need to turn up Z hours before the ferry so that we can process the numbers booked onto the ferries in time. It’s just maths isn’t it? There have been queues at Dover for every holiday for years, I simply don’t understand why it always seems to come as a surprise that lots of people want to go on holiday at holiday time. It’s not like they’re just turning up, they’ve got booked slots.

Yeah I'd deffo send in time and motion to study how long it takes the French officials to look at and stamp a passport.

Then I'd look at Calais and see how long it takes British officials to do the same.

Look at both places to see how many staff are in place ie does one have more official booths.

Monitor if both places get into pickles. If so, when? What are the bottle necks. Do british officials get into a pickle in France?

I'd study how it's managed in Dover and how it's managed in Calais. Then I'd check other checkpoints France have - this is showing my ignorance as I dont know if Switzerland has one with them. Is there a bottle neck at that point too.

If Swiss dont have a checkpoint, then it's just GB. Maybe some training is needed? That applies to wherever the problem is ie Dover or Calais.