Eurotunnel gets EU green light for drive-through fingerprint checks

Eurotunnel travellers will soon keep their seats while the biometric checks come to them. The European Commission has agreed to install an “eagle-eye” camera system — already used to supervise fingerprinting and facial imaging at airports in Rome and Paris — at the UK-France border. Both Folkestone and Calais are now kitted out with 120 kiosks apiece, watched over remotely by police in the style of airport e-gates.

Getlink chief executive Yann Leriche said the company wanted to replicate the “airport experience” and push it further. Each car pulls up to its own kiosk, with two stands per vehicle to read passports and capture fingerprints and facial images. “It will prevent the chaos in the long term and the short term and if the experiment works, as hopefully it will, then it will become permanent,” he said. The trial is set to run for two years.

At stake is the EU’s long-delayed entry and exit system, which requires all third-country citizens — British passport holders included — to hand over fingerprints and facial images when entering or leaving the Schengen area. EES was supposed to be live across the EU by 9 September, but nine of the 27 member states, France among them, still have not fully deployed it because of technical issues. This week it emerged the EU had filed a lawsuit against IBM and two other companies involved in implementing EES.

Earlier plans were messier. Getlink considered handing tablets to passengers in their cars so they could fingerprint themselves, and also looked at a system that would have people park and walk into the terminal. Both would have required police officers to be physically present every time a first-time traveller — known as a “primo” — gave prints, a safeguard against criminals borrowing a fellow passenger’s “clean skin” fingers. Leriche said the company told authorities: “It is going to be a mess.”

In the coming weeks Leriche will meet UK and French authorities with a 40-page proposal to turn Eurotunnel into a “laboratory” for an “intelligent border”, drawing on emerging tech and lessons from the US and Singapore. He was inspired by controls at the US/Mexico border, where drivers and passengers stay in their cars. He still has no idea when France will switch the system on: “Our kiosks are there, they can function but the connection with the French system is still not working.”