Suella Braverman denies Brexit to blame for Dover queues of 14 hour, After hearing that some passengers had waited in line for up to 14 hours to have their passports checked, Suella Braverman denied that Brexit was to blame for the delays at the port of Dover.
When a critical incident was declared at the port on Friday, extra sailings were being scheduled overnight in the hopes of reducing the backlog by Sunday midday.
On Sunday, the home secretary declared that since Brexit, border operations with France had been “quite excellent” on Sky News’ Sophy Ridge.
“Well, I don’t believe it’s accurate to suggest that Brexit has had a negative impact on this. Since we left the European Union many years ago, border operations and procedures have generally been excellent.
“I think there will always be a backup at peak times when there is a lot of strain crossing the Channel, whether that’s on tunnel or boats. I merely ask that everyone exercise some patience as the ferry operators clear the bottleneck.
But, the port’s CEO, Doug Bannister, acknowledged Brexit was contributing to longer processing waits at the border in an interview with The Observer a year ago.
“There will be improvements made,” he declared. Individuals will become more adept at reading passports, reviewing documentation, and lodging papers. Yet our trading environment has changed.
Subsequently, Braverman claimed that “poor weather” was to blame for the crisis at Dover and disputed that it would happen again on the Laura Kuenssberg programme on BBC One.
I genuinely feel for families and schoolchildren attempting to travel to France for the Easter holidays, she said. Nobody wants to spend the night at Dover waiting in a coach for hours.
It wasn’t something that would occur every school break, Braverman said in response to the question. The border has been running extremely smoothly in recent years. There is a specific confluence of events that have taken place right now.
She claimed that although the government was in contact with them, it was “ultimately a matter for the boat companies.”
The delays, according to Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, might be avoided if the government “started doing their actual job.”
The government has known for a very long time that they needed to make sure that there were resources in place to deal with additional documentation checks, but there are clearly a variety of issues that have gone into the delays here, and we’ve seen them before, she added on Sky News.
“Whether or not we quit the European Union is not the point. The point was that we were left with an administration that, yet again, made lofty promises but failed to keep them.
And I have a lot of sympathy for the families attempting to go for an Easter holiday, as well as for everyone else who has been affected by the upheaval and whose jobs are in jeopardy.
