The home secretary, Theresa May, is urgently considering contingency plans to avoid traffic queues up to five miles long building up at Dover when exit checks on all passengers are imposed on all British ports in three weeks time.
Ferry companies have warned that the imposition of exit checks at Dover from April 8 will create five mile (8.5km) traffic queues on the busiest travel days, stretching almost back to Folkestone and blocking Britain’s main trade route into Europe.
The home secretary told MPs that the introduction of the passport checks on everyone leaving Britain at ferry ports had already been pushed back beyond the Easter weekend to avoid bank holiday problems.
May faced an uncomfortable grilling from the Commons home affairs select committee on the issue on Tuesday during which she admitted that she couldn’t a decision on whether coach passengers are to be exempted from the checks because a trial is only now taking place ‘in putting coaches through’.
The home secretary said she couldn’t say what if any exemptions there would be to try to curb the queues until she had seen the evidence from the trial: “We can put contigency operations in place if there are public order problems,” she told them.
The checks are being imposed on every tourist as well as lorry drivers leaving Britain from 8 April as a result of the long-delayed implementation of David Cameron’s 2010 general election pledge to check every passenger going in and out of the country.
Ferry operators have revealed that immigration ministers refused to allow them to tackle the queues by relaxing the checks on the busiest days without their personal permission.
They also claim that the Home Office is trying to shift the blame for the holdups on to the companies by advising them to tell passengers that the checks are part of their business processes. They say this is “an untruthful response as the exit checks are being carried out purely at the Home Office’s behest”.
The immigration minister, James Brokenshire, has responded to the warnings of delays by advising families to set off earlier than normal when the new exit checks come into force. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “On busy days, I think it is advisable for anyone to set out earlier to ensure they’re at their port of departure on time.”
Ministers have already pushed the introduction of the checks beyond Easter to avoid chaotic scenes over the weekend break.
The UK Chamber of Shipping says a trial conducted in November, in which the University of Kent monitored traffic flows, showed that the exit checks will almost double the average check-in time for most tourist cars and increase them by a third for freight traffic.
The trial results found that on days when more than 7,500 cars arrive for the Dover ferries – which happened on 21 days last year – the checks will mean queues of more than 650 cars building up. It concluded: “On the busiest day last summer, more than 11,500 cars passed through Dover bound for France. The model showed that with tourist and freight check-in transactions extended by exit checks, the queue for traffic heading for the port of Dover would extend at least 8.5km, blocking the A20 almost as far as Folkestone.”
In a letter to Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, the UK Chamber of Shipping’s Tim Reardon decries the attempts by immigration ministers “to micromanage businesses’ check-in processes” by refusing to relax the checks on the busiest days, saying there are few obvious grounds for confidence that the Home Office would act in the best interests of passengers.
Reardon has told MPs: “It would remain to be seen whether ministerial indifference to long queues on the A20 and the A2 would endure when faced with recurrent dislocation of the civil life of Kent and with the wider economic damage that would ensue from the blockage of the UK’s main trade route into Europe.”
The refusal to allow the exit checks to be relaxed on the busiest days without ministerial permission echoes the row over passport checks at Heathrow airport which led to the home secretary, Theresa May, sacking Brodie Clark, a senior Home Office official.
Reardon says other preparatory work is incomplete and adds that talks are still going on over what to do about passengers on the 400 coaches a day which can pass through the port. They did not form part of the trial and could cause even longer delays if all passengers must disembark for passport checks.
Charlie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover and Deal, last week told the Commons that gridlock caused by trucks queueing for the Channel tunnel and
ferry ports was already a weekly occurrence and called for the creation of a 1,000-space lorry park to reduce congestion on the M20.
Brokenshire said the government had been working with ferry companies and Eurotunnel for the past 18 months and that the checks were very similar to those already carried out by airlines. He added that there were contingencies in place if problems occur.
