The Guardian reports that peak-time Eurostar trains are being forced daily to cross the English Channel with hundreds of empty seats, because border police cannot process passports quickly enough.
Since Brexit, British passports have had to be stamped, even for travellers who can go through electronic gates, increasing the time it takes to process passengers leaving from London’s St Pancras Station by 30%.As the UK government requested in the withdrawal agreement, British travellers must have their passports stamped by EU frontier officials in both directions.
While facilities at the stations were designed to only handle intra-EU passenger flows, with minimal formalities for most passengers, a lack of border staff to carry out these checks is another problem and, if the first services of the day don’t leave on time, it can cause serious delays throughout the rest of the day.
Eurostar bosses said about 350 out of 900 seats are normally left unsold on the first services between London, Paris and Brussels due to the constraints on processing passengers,m despite huge demand for the train services.
CE of Eurostar, Gwendoline Cazenave, said passengers were now being told to arrive up to 90 minutes before departures, but bottlenecks at stations still meant they could not all be processed in time.
At Amsterdam Central Station, cramped conditions mean only around 200 passengers can be processed before departure on services to London and there are severe limits on the UK Border Force location in the Dutch capital.
Cazenave said improved facilities at Amsterdam should be available from 2025, allowing 600 passengers, which make up two-thirds of capacity, to board.
According to Independent.co.uk, later in the day, more seats can be filled. But Francois Le Doze, Chief Commercial Officer for Eurostar, said: “A great proportion of trains are capped.”
Eurostar has already reduced the number of trains between London and Paris from 18 to 14 per day.
