‘Total gridlock’ at Dover as 8,000 travellers face new EU border checks on busiest day of year so far

Hundreds of families heading out of the UK on a bank-holiday break are trapped in grid-lock queues outside the Port of Dover as EU border checks are introduced.

Ferry passengers travelling to Europe face a wait of at least an hour and a half at the port while they wait to pass through border checks, the Port of Dover said in an update on Saturday morning. However holiday-makers have reported waiting a further two hours just to get into the port itself, with traffic in “total gridlock” in the surrounding roads.

Saturday is expected to be the port’s busiest day of the year so far, with more than 8,000 travellers. Families will also have to put up with unusually high May temperatures as they wait to board their ferries. Dover is expected to reach a high of 25 degrees on Saturday and an amber heat alert is in place for the South East.

This is the first holiday period since the implementation of the EU’s entry-exit system (EES), which involves people having their fingerprints registered and photograph taken.

The full system at the Port of Dover is not up and running yet, and is still awaiting installation of French technology. As a result French border police are manually creating traveller records at the eastern docks.

Rosamund Hall, who is travelling to France with her partner Paul and four-year-old son, spoke to The Independent at about 8:30am on Saturday morning and said they had been trying to get into the port for over two hours.

“All of the roads leading into Dover are total gridlock,” she said. “The traffic management control don’t seem to have a handle on what’s going on and it’s very difficult to get information on what the processing time is like.

“I’ve travelling in convoy with my parents to France and they are ahead of us. They said that when they got into the actual port area that was also incredibly slow. You are going into another log jam. They got into the port area at around 6:50am and they’ve only just got through passport control, so that’s nearly an hour and 45 minutes, and that doesn’t account for the huge amount of traffic to even get there.”

She said that her car was still about a mile away from the port entrance but that the “roads are looking like a car park, it’s gridlock, everything static”.

Ms Hall, who writes about wine for The Independent, described the situation, saying: “There is really heavy traffic approaching from the M20 and gridlock traffic coming down from the A2 entrance, which are the two major roads that come into the port area. Those people who are coming through Dover itself and trying to feed in are being sent back to the main arterial roads.

“We’re travelling with P&0 ferries and were supposed to have a 9am crossing. They told us to not arrive any more than two hours before check-in closes, so for my 9am ferry that would be 6am. We followed those instructions are were aiming to arrive at around about 6:20am. It’s laughable that it’s like this and this isn’t going to get any better when summer comes along.”

Simon Calder, The Independent’s travel correspondent who is at Dover, said: “Unfortunately if you are one of the 8,000 families who are heading abroad this morning and during the rest of the day, getting the ferry to either Calais or Dunkirk, then you are in for a wait.

“I am looking across and there are cars waiting all the way back down the A20 that goes into Dover. Ahead of me, I can see about a thousand cars that have been here since dawn.

“Normally they would be hoping to process about 800 cars an hour, I am not seeing anything like that rate.”