Access to the British port of Dover is always difficult on Saturday morning, the day of major vacation departures, the day after a particularly complicated day due to a lack of French border police personnel. “It’s very, very busy“, declared Saturday morning on BBC Radio 4 Roger Gough, president of the county of Kent (south-east of England).
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From 5 a.m. (3 a.m. GMT) on Saturday, the 12 passport control posts were staffed with French border police officers, the director general of the port of Dover, Dough Bannister, said on BBC Radio 4. He pointed out that additional checks due to Brexit increase delays in boarding.
10,000 cars expected
But with the affluence of this day which was already announcedconsiderably charged“Adds the accumulated delay on Friday, he underlined. Thus, 8,500 cars boarded on Friday and 10,000 are expected on Saturday, he added, when the school holidays begin in most establishments in England and Wales.
But according to Kent County’s Roger Gough, 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, 3,000 trucks, as part of a system implemented in the event of congestion at the border. British authorities railed against the monster traffic jams created by a shortage of Border Patrol personnel at the port of Dover on Friday morning.
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Judging the situationunacceptable“, Foreign Minister Liz Trucs, campaigning to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, urged France on Friday to take “measures to increase capacity at the border and limit further disruption to UK tourists, and avoid this dire situation in the future“.
On the French side, the regional prefect Georges-François Leclerc invoked “an unforeseeable technical incident in the Channel Tunnel“, who “led the border police“French to”delay the desired full operational capacity by one hour” Friday morning.
A causal link disputed by Eurotunnel, which denies any responsibility in the situation at the port of Dover and argues that the signaling problem “minorwhich affected the tunnel came long after the difficulties began.