“It’s very, very busy,” Roger Gough, county president of Kent County, said on Saturday morning on BBC Radio 4. Access to the British port of Dover, an essential crossing point to cross the English Channel, was always complicated on Saturday morning, the day of the main vacation departures.
From 5 a.m. local time (6 a.m. in Paris) this Saturday, the 12 passport control posts were manned by French border police officers, however they received on BBC Radio 4 the director general of the port of Dover, Dough Banister . He pointed out that the additional controls due to Brexit increase shipping delays.
But to the concurrence of this day that already promised to be “quite busy”, the delay accumulated on Friday is added, he stressed. Thus, 8,500 cars were shipped on Friday and 10,000 are expected for Saturday, he added, when the school holidays begin in most establishments in England and Wales.
According to Roger Gough of the county of Kent, access to the Channel Tunnel is also being delayed due to storage on the M20 motorway, which provides access to the south-east coast of England, by 3,000 lorries, as part of a system put in place in case of congestion. on the border.
Shortage of border police personnel
British authorities criticized the monstrous traffic jams created by a shortage of Border Patrol personnel at the port of Dover on Friday morning.
Calling the situation “unacceptable,” Foreign Minister Liz Truss, campaigning to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, urged France on Friday to take “measures to increase capacity at the border and limit further disruptions to British tourists, and avoid this terrible situation in the future.
On the French side, the regional prefect Georges-François Leclerc invoked “an unforeseeable technical incident in the English Channel Tunnel”, which “led the French border police” to “change the desired total operational capacity in one hour” on Friday. in the morning.
A causal link disputed by Eurotunnel, which denies any responsibility for the Dover port situation and argues that the “minor” signaling problem that affected the tunnel occurred long after the difficulties began.
Source: BFM TV
