At around 9.30am on Saturday, just as the Port of Dover warned of a 4 hour 30 minute wait for families hoping to sail to France, the passport control staff at the Eastern Docks threw in the EES towel.
The EU entry-exit system was suspended, and officers reverted from the digital border scheme to analogue stamping of passports.
Since before dawn on Saturday – the busiest day of the year so far for departing UK holidaymakers – queues had built up at the entrance to the main departure point for Continental Europe.
In common with the Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone – which has also seen delays of up to two hours – motorists are processed before departing for northern France. This has the advantage of allowing them a swift getaway once they arrive in Calais or Dunkerque.
But with just 11 control points to process an estimated 8,000 vehicles on Saturday, the bottleneck proved too much.
Since 10 April 2026, the French Police aux Frontieres have been required to register passport information from all “third-country nationals” including British holidaymakers when leaving the UK. No biometrics are taken, because it would be impractical to register fingerprints and facial biometrics in lanes of moving traffic.
But simply registering the required information on the central EES database takes significantly longer than the previous analogue checks and stamping.
The French authorities invoked Article 9 of the entry-exit system legislation, which allows them temporarily to suspend EES registration if queues become unmanageable.
Doug Bannister, chief executive of the Port of Dover, told The Independent: “Police aux Frontieres this morning have been fantastic. They turned up with the right number of resources, and they’ve been processing as best they can.
“However, the parameters that have been laid down now as a part of the process has slowed the processing at the border down.
“There’s some mitigations in the event of severe queuing which allows the border to be processed in a more manual way. And that’s what has had to be invoked because the congestion was just so severe through the town.
“We had some challenges with people not following our travel advice to stick to the main routes, and that congested the town. So if I could also just please encourage people to stick to the main routes, it is the fastest way – despite what Satnav says.
Mr Bannister said IT problems had prevented the port from deploying a new £40m EES facility that would have eased the queues.
“We need to review following this busy weekend with our with our government and with the French authorities on how can we make certain that we have a process in place that’s for the port of Dover so that we don’t encounter these problems come the busy summer season.”
At airports across Europe, travellers are reporting waits at passport control of an hour or more.
Greece has suspended indefinitely biometric registration for British visitors.
