Article from today’s Times…the EU and France couldn’t design a more effective way of detering the millions of people who holiday here if they tried.
…that’s assuming it’s broadly true and nor scare mongering.
Wonder how it will impact on WDA C de S holders who whilst are legal residents but don’t have EU Passport.
"Britons face chaos and delay when entering the EU next year, peers have warned ministers, as two sets of postBrexit border checks are imposed.
They will have “serious consequences” on the “rights and liberties of UK citizens”, a Lords committee told Priti Patel in a letter that said government was “unprepared” for the reforms.
According to the peers the European travel information and authorisation system (Etias) and the Schengen area Entry/Exit System (Ees) will have a big impact on routine travel between the UK and the bloc.
The Ees, scheduled to start in May, will require most travellers to provide facial images and fingerprints to authorities in the EU, with those details checked every time they travel.
The committee predicted that the checks were “likely to cause sustained delays and disruption”. It said it would be impossible to conduct the system for people in cars, significantly slowing the process. Ees checks “are expected to permanently slow the flow of UK vehicles and passengers to and from the EU,” said the committee.
Etias, which starts six months later, will require most travellers to apply online for a travel authorisation prior to entering EU countries. The committee has called on ministers to press Brussels for clarity over how manual processing of Etias applications will work."
Hmmm, knew about ETIAS, hadn’t spotted this EES thing.
About the only good thing I can see online is that it is unlikely to be ready in May 2022, I’m not totally convinced that “you can’t do biometrics for car passengers” as portable fingerprint scanners are definitely a thing these days, though I can’t see it exactly speeding up border checks.
Definitely not “just for Brits” - for all non-EU travellers. It’s not the EU’s fault that we decided to leave and put ourselves within the scope of this.
No, it’s definitely a thing - now that I look it has been in the pipeline since at least 2013.
I reckon it’s workable enough, but will be painful.
Not done for Brits nor a Brexit punishment…if you read it again you will see it’s for all travellers to the EU from outside the bloc. It just so happens the biggest tourists by nationality and driver numbers are British…BF carry about 3m alone in a normal year.
Daughter (who travels in and out of UK a lot) says that getting into Uk is a nightmare. She regularly queues for 3 hours.
So I reckon they are stirring up this story to - yet again - take the focus off the shambles that is Boris Britain.
Once in place ETIAS will makes things easier as it is a visa waiver scheme, and one application will last for years. And with biometric passports and the like all should be fine for most. It has been in development for year, and I think there was a thread on it about 18 months ago.
Maybe some car passengers will have to wait a touch longer, but surely speeding up train and plane passengers is a much bigger volume of people?
And 3m coming into France from Uk via a ferry company is peanuts. There are over 500million entries into Europe every year. It’s not all about the UK……
How is your daughter travelling Jane? I have been to UK twice recently and apart from disembarkation being a bit slow I have got through quickly just having to show my passport both at Plymouth and Portsmouth.
Where was that from, we have personal experience of thrice and two for friends at Plymouth and Portsmouth and on all occasions very quick and efficient and less than 45 minutes…and that’s with a ferry spewing out maybe 350+ cars.
Blame the inefficient airports then!..and yes UK is in a mess but don’t always look at La Belle France through rose tinted glasses…we have many friends who are equally scathing (I think unjustifiably) of Macron and the political mess and corruption that they see in gov circles, and say at least the media tries to highlight it in the UK.
Did I say anything rose tinted about France? I don’t think so as I am a realist about many frustrating issues here. But I find it far more exasperating constantly to read of people only considering things from a narrow perspective. People who drive between the UK and France in private cars are in a a minority, there is a bigger picture.
From 2013 to 2017 according to HMG dept Transport official stats I have dug out over 15million peope travelled to France each year by sea! Not what I would describe as a minority. In fact the majority of visitors to France use this, followed a distant second by the Netherlands.
I’ve flown into Manchester and Heathrow in the last couple of months without any issues. Both of them through passport control within 20 minutes. This was flying midweek, during the afternoon. Maybe I was just lucky.
Heathrow is famous amongst frequent fliers for delays of multiple hours though. It’s reported over and over again Then you have airports like Manchester which has a bad rep regardless of Covid and Stansted where woe betide you if you’re arriving at a peak time.
At Heathrow sometimes the autonatic gates aren’t working which has caused multihour queues. But I believe somehow the root problem is how Border Force are organised or labour issues with them.
I think the Times (or the Lords) have over-egged this. The EU source I’ve just read sees the EES system primarily as a background data system replacing passport stamping, and actually speeding up point of entry procedures.
My guess is the ‘rights and liberties of UK citizens’ alluded to relate to the fact that the UK is almost unique in not having a national identity card, and not routinely collecting biometric data like fingerprints, so I guess EES/ETIAS might have particularly adverse effects on UK travelers - but interestingly, the UK first introduced biometric passports in response to other countries (primarily the US) requiring it for visa-waived entry, so I guess the ball is again in the UK’s court (to either introduce fingerprinting or negotiate an exception).
Oh - and I don’t think it will be fully implemented until 2023.
I think that’s part of the problem of peoples perception of the issues. People only moan when things go wrong. The press only report the problems. People only see the reports of horrific queues and think it’s like that all the time. I’ve flown into Manchester many times and yes, there are sometimes horrible queues, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Same with Heathrow. I have queued for a couple of hours there, but mostly it’s been a manageable 20 to 40 minutes.
It means that entering the EU for non-resident Brits will be a bit like entering the US as long as you’re not driving. Perfectly doable but a bit of a pain especially if you have trouble with online forms. Except that you can’t drive from Dover to the US.
When all this was originally thought of, the UK was part of the EU and so it wasn’t going to be a problem.
Any ideas how EES will work with CdS? Quoted article says ‘will apply to most passengers’
And somewhere someone says will replace passport stamping - but with CdS not supposed to have passport stamped? (Though they stamped Madame, and not me)
And presume don’t need an etias if entering France (though presume its handy if popping across a border - but there’s usually no checks?)
Perhaps this is to identify all the ‘second home’ CdS holders?
