actually missed their flight<\/a>.<\/p>\nBecause French customs at Dover and the Channel Tunnel are on this side of the water, the EES machines are here too. Ditto Eurostar\u2019s terminal at St Pancras in London.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg)
The Eurotunnel EES check-in hangar can handle more than 50 cars at any one time\u2026but it\u2019s not working yet for most<\/p>\n
But, as the icing on this ludicrous cake, none of them have been turned on by French officials yet for anyone other than coach passengers and HGV drivers. Staff will still have to create a file for each passenger \u2013 but just without the key biometrics the EU was so keen on. An electronic placeholder on the EU\u2019s security cloud, as it were.<\/p>\n
Ten years in development, millions spent by the likes of the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel to ensure compliance, six months in live testing. And it\u2019s still not working. Through, it should be said, no fault of the operators.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re waiting on French officials to give it the green light.<\/p>\n
But here we are in May – and it\u2019s first real test – and if you wanted a gamble, the smart money would be on it not being fully up and running until September. The can kicked further down the road and beyond the school summer holidays.<\/p>\n
Some relief for those using our ports, perhaps, but not so for others.<\/p>\n
The EU has dropped the ball with its EES. Picture: iStock<\/p>\n
The situation has got so bad, Greece has said Brits (five million of us visit each year) will be exempt to prevent chaos at its airports. Which, while welcome, surely makes a mockery of the whole process?<\/p>\n
Perhaps not surprisingly, the EU isn\u2019t best pleased.<\/p>\n
Whatever your views on the EU \u2013 this EES mess has not been its finest hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whatever you think of the European Union and our relationship with it, there\u2019s no denying that it is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":979172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[29264,2000,299,5187,2418,495,391],"class_list":["post-979171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-dover","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-folkestone","tag-kent","tag-opinion"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116622054408825650","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/979172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}