Travellers using the Eurotunnel between the UK and France are set to face airport-style passport and fingerprinting controls under a breakthrough agreement intended to prevent what the company's chief executive described as short-term and long-term chaos in Folkestone and Calais.
The European Commission has authorised a new system in which an eagle eye camera setup, already used at airports in Rome and Paris to supervise fingerprinting and facial imaging, will be deployed at the border between the two countries.
Yann Leriche, the chief executive of Getlink, the Eurotunnel owner, said the company had tried to replicate the airport experience but wanted to go much further. Instead of leaving their cars to provide biometrics inside a terminal building, holidaymakers and business travellers will be greeted by special drive-through terminals in Folkestone and Calais.
Both sides are now equipped with 120 kiosks, each overseen by an eagle eye camera monitored by police, an arrangement comparable to airport e-gates where officers are not physically present at every gate.
The controls are designed for the EU's entry and exit system, known as EES, which requires all third-country citizens, including British passport holders, to submit fingerprints and facial images when entering and leaving the Schengen area. The scheme has been delayed for years and was supposed to be active across the EU by 9 September, but nine of the 27 member states, including France, have yet to deploy it fully because of continuing technical issues.
EES has long been a logistical nightmare for Eurotunnel and a potential cause of miles-long tailbacks on the approach to the terminal. Getlink originally planned to hand passengers a tablet in their cars for self-fingerprinting and facial capture, and also considered having travellers park and go into the terminal, but both models would have required police officers to be physically present for first-time fingerprinting.
"We told the authorities: it is going to be a mess. Many people are going to the wrong place and you can't have police jumping from one place to the next to solve the issues," Leriche said, adding that customers would have had a bad experience at peak times. He said nobody had previously considered offering an airport experience at this border, and recalled asking: why not?
After what he called many, many discussions with the European Commission and the French authorities, the company was finally authorised to trial the cameras at each kiosk. "The French authorities are also on board because for them it is more efficient, too, so we are all aligned on the trial," he said. The trial will last two years, but Eurotunnel hopes the experiment will become permanent.
Under the system, each car will pull up to an individual kiosk, with two stands per vehicle to read passports and take fingerprints and facial images. Leriche said the company had been inspired by visits to border controls between the US and Mexico, where drivers and passengers remain in their cars. In the coming weeks he will meet UK and French authorities to present a 40-page proposal for Eurotunnel to become a laboratory for an intelligent border, using emerging technology and lessons learned from the US and Singapore.
The requirement for an officer to be present whenever a first-time passenger, known as a primo, submits fingerprints was designed as a safeguard against subterfuge, such as criminals using a fellow passenger with a clean fingerprint record. Leriche said he had no idea when France would introduce the system. "It has been delayed and delayed and delayed, but our kiosks are there, they are can function but the connection with the French system is still not working," he said. This week it emerged that the EU had filed a lawsuit against IBM and two other companies involved in the implementation of EES.
