August 9th - Keeping a lid on delays at Dover
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I've been in Dover talking with the port's chief executive, Doug Bannister, who says additional staffing and expanded facilities have proved effective in keeping a lid on delays.
“The numbers are turning up as we expected they would,” he said. “And the ‘dwell times’ we have had before border controls have only once reached the maximum peak we had warned people might be the case.”
It comes after some motorists faced delays of 12 hours or more in July 2022 as the first big post-Covid getaway came into conflict with new post-Brexit passport rules.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 9th of August and I'm recording this just a little late in the day because I'm back at the independent office having spent much of the day in Dover. |
| 0:18.5 | The main British ferry port connections of, to Calais and Dunkirk, |
| 0:24.6 | and it was a beautiful day. The white cliffs were looking magnificent, the sky was blue, |
| 0:31.5 | the sea was calm and very busy with ferries shuttling across to Calais and Dunkirk. I was at the port of Dover |
| 0:42.0 | to talk to the boss, Doug Bannister, and I was there because, well, this time last year, we were |
| 0:49.0 | still talking about why there had been such incredibly long waits at the start of the school holidays. |
| 0:56.3 | Some people had some quite long waits this summer holidays, but it's been nothing like as bad as was predicted, |
| 1:05.0 | as you can hear from Doug now. |
| 1:07.7 | Well, it's really pleasing to see that all the hard work that teams across the port put |
| 1:13.1 | in on making certain that the summer planning went okay and it's all gone according to plan. |
| 1:18.3 | The numbers are turning up as we expected they would and the dwell times that we've had |
| 1:22.0 | before border controls have only once for one hour reached the maximum peak that we had warned people might be the case. |
| 1:29.4 | I raised the question with Doug of, well, saying basically, |
| 1:33.8 | a lot of people would think even a weight of two and a half hours is really quite considerable. |
| 1:41.5 | 90 minutes was the rate for some other busy weekends and that simply seems excessive. |
| 1:49.9 | But he put it to me that actually if you are talking about leaving the UK, if you do it by air, |
| 1:57.1 | well then, goodness, you've got to get to the airport, probably a couple of hours ahead of time, go through all those formalities. |
| 2:04.9 | And then when you get to the other end, you have to, of course, pick up baggage, you need to go through passport control. |
| 2:12.4 | You have to organise your onward journey. |
| 2:14.8 | But in fact, if you're in your car and you're traveling across |
| 2:18.7 | and you've gone through all the EU hard border formalities at Dover, then once you get to France, |
| 2:28.6 | you are free. Let's dig a little deeper into what has happened though, because of course July 2022, |
... |
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