Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon called a goodness Thursday the 8th of December already, which means that a fortnight tomorrow, the UK border force strikes will start at six of Britain's airports.

Yes, the PCS union, which is involved in a deep row with

the home office and the rest of the government overpay, pensions and job security has called

eight days of strikes. That's from the 23rd to the 26th of December inclusive and then from the 28th to New Year's Eve.

And it's applying at six airports in the UK.

In order of size, they are Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff.

And, well, it's been a very, very busy 24 hours since this was first called in working out what is going to be happening.

We've now had ministers lining up to say there will be severe disruption.

That's come from the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, as well as the

immigration minister Robert Jenrick and the Transport Minister Baroness Veer. So that's what they

are expecting. And talking to Manchester Airport, they say there will be cancellations as a result of this.

It's been reported actually in the Times that 30% of flights could be grounded in and out of those airports.

And I'm just going to run through why that could happen.

On the 23rd of December, which, and I'll run through the bingo

cards in a short while of what's busiest when, 23rd of December, busiest day for incoming

travellers at Heath Road during that strike spell. 125,000 seats and probably almost as many

passengers due to come in to UK's

busiest airport. An awful lot of those will be arriving in the first wave, which starts before 5am

and goes on for several hours. Now, if they all turn up in the passport hall and because the excellent men and

women of UK border force are not there with their many decades of experience and expertise,

and instead it's people from the military or quickly trained civil servants who are doing that,

then things can back up very quickly.

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