Hello and welcome to today's independent podcast. It is the afternoon of Wednesday,

the 5th of April, and goodness, what a beautiful day it is. I'm lucky enough to be in the port

of Dover. Yes, the very place, which is, of course, the main link between the UK and the continent

in terms of ferry traffic. About one third of all the trade with the EU goes through Dover,

and I'm looking across a calm channel. There's a P&O ferry just set set off i think a dfds one is um passing it just at the approach to dover

the white cliffs are looking splendid and i'm also glancing up at the castle which for the

past two thousand years has dominated this very tranquil and beautiful scene.

So, great day to be travelling.

However, most people are not travelling on Wednesday.

They are going to be travelling if they're heading out perhaps on a coach from Dover this coming weekend.

It's most likely to be on Friday, the busiest, busiest day.

And if you cast your mind back to last Friday,

well, in the evening of Friday the 31st of March,

we saw, well, crowds queues building up of coaches.

The backlog wasn't cleared until midnight on Sunday, by which time tens of thousands of passengers on coaches, many of them schoolchildren had had a miserable, long wait, 12 hours or more. Absolutely awful.

And so what's going to happen to stop that happening again?

Well, for a start, there's going to be a lot fewer coaches.

This was really first contact between the UK and the new rules that we insisted upon.

We said when we left the European Union,

look, we want to be third country national.

So whatever you say to the people coming in from Venezuela or Dubai or Hong Kong,

we'd like to be treated like that, please.

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