St Pancras, we have a problem. And that problem is space… the space it needs to process passengers through the French border before they can board trains to Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam.
High Speed 1 owns and operates St Pancras International station.
Eurostar runs international trains while Southeastern runs domestic trains into Kent over HS1 tracks.
For completeness, East Midlands Railway runs trains to the East Midlands and South Yorkshire, but they are not part of this story.
It’s perhaps fashionable to look the other way when the words ‘Brexit’ and ‘problem’ come into conversations, but this is one of those times when the two are firmly linked and cannot be ignored.
HS1 Chief Executive Dyan Crowther is clear.
When RailReview asks what she would say to someone who could fix the problems that HS1 (and by extension Eurostar) faces, she replies: “You’ve got to fix the borders.
“We have a couple of things on our radar for the next 12 months. It’s what are our enablers of growth. It’s all about international. That’s where the appetite is. It ticks the box from a sustainable perspective. It ticks the box because we’ve got capacity. It just ticks the box on so many levels. But we need to fix the borders.”
Travellers to and from the European Union from Britain must now have their passports stamped on entry and exit from the EU. This process takes longer than the checks that took place when the UK was an EU member.
In one of his final acts in the post, Eurostar Chief Executive Jacques Damas wrote to the House of Commons Transport SelectCommittee on September 26. In his letter, he explained the passport-stamping problem.
“Following the UK’s departure from the European Union, additional border checks apply to UK citizens seeking to enter Schengen, as they do to all third-country nationals. Since c.40% of our customers are UK nationals, this has resulted in a significant increase in the processing times at stations. The stamping of British passports by continental police adds at least 15 seconds to individual passengers’ border crossing times.”
He went on to explain that despite adding an extra French control booth at St Pancras, the longer checks have cut capacity.
“As things stand, peak capacity through the stations is c.30% lower than pre-Brexit. Even with all booths manned, St Pancras can currently process a maximum 1,500 passengers per hour vs 2,200 in 2019.”
Were it not for COVID slashing demand, this problem would have become apparent some time ago. Eurostar’s reduced timetable mitigated the problem, but with demand now rising as the pandemic recedes, the longer passport checks show themselves in the longer queues around St Pancras.
It explains why Eurostar no longer calls at Ebbsfleet International and Ashford International stations. Damas wrote: “Reopening the intermediate stations (where demand and yields are much lower) would make things even worse, as it would take away from London vital border police resources. The reality of traffic numbers is such that a police officer controls five to ten times more passengers in our large terminals than in intermediate stations.”
Crowther explains what’s being done to cut those queues. One is to add border officers. Another is to add staff to manage the queues.
She says: “It’s given us the chance to innovate, to try different types of technology, so we’ve been working with Eurostar to try running an app-based queuing system. The whole philosophy of that is to queue on the station, in cafes, restaurants and shops, and we’ll call them up 30 minutes before departure. So, we take them out of the physical queue and put them somewhere else.
“It’s a bit like when you go to the deli counter in a supermarket and take your ticket. It’s the digital version of that. That’s been fairly successful and we’re looking to see how and when we can expand that and scale it up.
“Eurostar has also done a biometric trial where you integrate your passport information and your ticket information and all of that. So, you just walk through and an iPad scans you and goes ‘green, walk through’ or ‘red, you need to go to this side’. So, a real opportunity to innovate and use technology.”
However, the problem is going to get worse with what Crowther describes as a ‘googly’ fast approaching.
“That’s the new entry-exit system. Imagine the queue I have at the moment just to do normal processing… From May next year, which is the revised implementation date, if you’re from the UK you have to pre-register, you have to fill in various information, but more importantly you have to do a finger-print test. And you have to do that finger-print test in front of a PAF official.
“The challenge we have, and we’re working on, is where do those desks go? Because we need 24 of them, we estimate, because you’re going to have to queue people.
