July 21st - The great getaway gets underway

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Many might remember the third Friday in July last year when the queues at Dover were huge for a range of reasons including Brexit. This morning I checked and the port of Dover said the queue for passport control was just twenty minutes long. However tomorrow morning travellers are predicted to be stuck waiting at the port for two and a half hours. So I'll keep my eyes on what happens next with the port as well as how the trains and airports are doing this weekend during the great getaway.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast, the last one of the week. And for a lot of people,
0:09.6	well, they might remember the third Friday in July from last year for all the wrong reasons.
0:17.6	I was at Dover when everything went very badly wrong last year. You might recall,
0:25.7	what I've seen it was. Cars in queues that were lasting 10, 12, 15 hours, similar scenes at
0:34.3	Euro Tunnels Terminal at Folkestone. The whole of South East Kent apparently in gridlock,
0:40.8	utter shambles that was, well, there were many factors at work,
0:46.0	but one of them was the post-Brexit checks that the UK insisted upon,
0:52.8	as dictated by the government's terms of leaving the European Union after a democratic vote to do so.
1:00.0	And that means that every single passport has to be looked at, stamped, theoretically, the officials should check to make sure you haven't spent more than 90 days in the last 180 days in the European Union, although I imagine the number of times that has happened at Dover is vanishingly small.
1:21.6	Remember, we have an EU external hard border in South East Kent in a very constrained site between the cliffs and the
1:33.0	channel so that's what there is to contend with and then therefore when things start going wrong they
1:40.0	can unravel very quickly actually there's an analogy in Heathrow, busiest airport in Europe,
1:49.8	and Gatwick, the busiest single runway airport in the world. Not much slack in the system when
1:56.1	things go wrong. Having said that, I checked mid-morning and the Port of Dover says the Q4 French passport control is just 20 minutes or so.
2:08.1	And that is really the deciding factor. We saw actually again at Easter, the start of the school holidays.
2:14.9	31st of May it was an awful lot of coaches turning up and again
2:18.7	getting stuck for many hours. All kinds of facilities have been put in place. I actually talked to
2:25.8	the boss of the Port of Dover, Doug Bannister, and he says, done everything we possibly can.
2:32.2	We think they are going to be able to cope but obviously
2:35.6	there might be something that could not have been predicted that could suffix as it is the peak
2:42.6	time is going to be tomorrow morning roughly six till 11 or so at the port maybe till 1 o'clock
2:50.6	and they are warning that you could be stuck for
	...

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