Cross-Channel ferry passengers were being told to arrive in good time at Dover as queues built at the Port of Dover amid fears the severe disruption of recent days could return to Kent throughout the summer.
The ferry operator DFDS told passengers there were queues of about an hour for French border checks on Monday morning and to “allow a minimum of 120 minutes before your departure to complete all controls”.
P&O Ferries tweeted: “The queues have picked up and it is taking approximately one hour to clear passport control.”
Holidaymakers faced queues of up to 11 hours over the weekend with the British foreign minister, Liz Truss, blaming the French for shortages of passport control staff but others blaming red tape caused by Brexit.
Toby Howe, the senior highway manager at Kent county council and the tactical lead at Kent Resilience Forum, said the queues at Dover were “normal for a Monday morning”.
However, there are fears queues could build up again next weekend, one of the busiest of the year for holidaymakers.
Howe told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that next weekend was likely to be “very busy”. He said: “It’s the second busiest getaway weekend of the summer holidays.
“As we’ve just found out the weekend just gone, traffic numbers travelling across the Channel were back to pre-pandemic levels and with the increased checks it is slower to get through, so it takes very little to cause those tailbacks.”
On what the rest of the summer could bring, he said: “It’s a very vulnerable situation, it takes very little to cause further issues.”
One of the causes of the delay over the weekend was the need for British passport holders to have their passports stamped. Sources at Dover say this increased the average checking time for each car from about 58 seconds to 90 seconds.
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While Brexit came into force in January 2021, the impact on tourism to the continent is only becoming evident as post-pandemic passenger numbers return to normal volumes.
Port authorities said they processed 72,000 passengers by Sunday morning after bumper-to-bumper traffic stretching back for miles made for a miserable start to people’s summer holidays.
John Keefe, the director of public affairs at Eurotunnel, said one of the problems was the poor quality of the roads in Dover. Before the M20 was built, drivers used the A2 but this was never upgraded to a dual carriageway.
“It needs to be improved so that we can split the traffic between the two routes. And then that takes the pressure off when there is a mixture of passenger and freight,” he told Radio 4.
He also said the gridlock could be alleviated if more hauliers chose Eurotunnel’s rail services.