Dover council leader warns postponed EU entry-exit system would have been ‘complete and utter carnage’
The EU’s postponed entry-exit system (EES) would have wreaked “complete and utter carnage” in Britain, Dover‘s council leader has said.
The scheme – which would have forced British travellers to have their fingerprints and faces scanned to enter the bloc – had been pushed back past its planned November 10 rollout date by the EU itself because the technology is not yet ready.
A relieved Kevin Mills, who leads Dover District Council, unleashed a scathing attack on the scheme at a special session of the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs committee.
He told the committee: “None of the infrastructure is ready. None of the IT is ready.
“It would have been complete and utter carnage. We are more than happy there has been a delay.
“Without EES, we still see the town coming to a gridlock several times a year. You add this on to it, it’s a gridlock on steroids – and that’s what concerns us.
“If the Department for Transport are still saying they expect up to 14-hour delays, there’s a problem somewhere that needs to be addressed.
“In Dover, it’s not just the A20… The whole town stops. Nothing moves. You see ambulances stuck in queues.
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“Everywhere suffers, and if we don’t get this right it will backlog. And then it backs up into the rest of Kent.
“I can’t over-exaggerate the damage it does – business-wise, to the community, to individuals, to the security of the country – because staff can’t even get into work to secure the borders. That’s our problem.”
Germany, France and the Netherlands all said their systems were not ready, while other sources told the BBC that there has been “no live testing” of the EU’s software on the UK’s border systems.
But disappointed Eurotunnel execs quashed these claims, insisting almost everything was in place – and warning that the costs of a delay would be passed on to consumers, or even the EU itself.
John Keefe, the chief corporate and public affairs officer for Eurotunnel owners Getlink Group, told the Lords committee: “We’re disappointed it’s been delayed. We were ready. We had all of our technology in place, our infrastructure in place. We’d recruited most of the staff.”
Keefe vowed that said staff will not be laid off, but will be kept on in a range of roles – but Getlink’s investment so far tots up to some £70million.
He added: “We were looking forward to starting to recover that cost. All of that will have to be put into hibernation. A cost like this inevitably is passed on to the consumer.”
But he also said that, given his firm “followed the project to the letter”, it was “considering cost recovery” from the EU.
“To see that cost just sitting there is not an acceptable solution for a publicly quoted company,” he fumed.
Fellow UK-Europe travel stalwarts Eurostar also insisted it was ready for the November 10 start date.
The high-speed rail firm’s general secretary Gareth Williams said: “We sit there with a high investment in infrastructure that is idle.
“What lies behind the latest delay is the weakness of the test environment that did not give the member states the kind of confidence that we all know is necessary – that the systems will communicate properly, and will be robust and reliable.”
In response, Keefe has pushed for the delay time to be used to develop systems to scan travellers’ faces in their cars to save time at the border.
He said the entry-exit system was more designed for an “airport environment where people are in an indoor, well-lit, weather-protected, comfortable, spacious environment with plenty of time”.
Keefe continued: “Our model is a very high-density vehicle-based system. So people are sitting in metal boxes, and we have to get the same level of biometric data from them, sitting in a car, as you can with an individual passenger, on foot, in an airport.
“There’s a lot of work going on on the improvement of the capture and sophistication of facial biometrics. We believe there is a way of capturing fingerprint biometrics at distance.
“We hope we can engage with the EU to bring these things forward, to make the most of the delay, and bring an even better system into place.
“We know that in other countries it is possible to capture your facial biometric, in your car, on your way to the border.”