Britons should brace for more travel chaos

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SINCE THE end of covid-19 restrictions, foreign travel for Britons has become a byword for “headache”. Last week coach-loads of British holidaymakers faced 12-hour waits to board cross-Channel ferries at the port of Dover. As well as poor weather conditions and a high volume of travellers, post-Brexit passport checks played their part, the government conceded. As Britons travel abroad for some sunshine over the coming Easter break, more chaos is expected. Our number-crunching shows that demand for travel is almost back to pre-pandemic levels. Britain’s airports and railways, however, are struggling to rev back up.

For holidaymakers going abroad, much of the trouble is due to more onerous border controls since Brexit. Eurostar, which operates trains between London and mainland Europe, recently said it was capping at two fifths the number of passengers on its morning services, to allow time for additional passport checks. Air passengers have faced similar trials over the past year. Departures at Heathrow airport, which handles around one-quarter of British air travel, were capped at 100,000 people a day last summer—about one-quarter fewer than normal peak capacity. The measures continued for three months as the airport struggled to deal with post-lockdown travel and staffing shortages. Passenger numbers at Heathrow remain 10% below their pre-pandemic level (see left-hand chart).

Domestic travel in Britain has not been much smoother, though average volumes have remained lower than they were before the pandemic. Britain has some of the worst traffic congestion in the world. The average speed of vehicles travelling during rush hour in London last year was a snail-like 9mph (14kph) according to TomTom, a travel-technology firm—the slowest of 390 cities it tracks globally. Although car journeys on major roads around Britain remain about 10% below their average number before the pandemic, peak-hour traffic is close to pre-pandemic levels.

Public transport is also struggling, but for different reasons. The number of passengers on London Underground trains is about 15% lower than the pre-pandemic norm. That is in large part because of increased home-working. Although weekend travel is more common than it was before the pandemic, weekdays remain far quieter: Mondays and Fridays are less busy by one-quarter (see right-hand chart). This has squeezed revenues. The pandemic left Transport for London (TfL), which manages the city’s transport and roads, with a £6bn ($7.5bn) shortfall. Although TfL has since made some of that up, fewer passengers in the long run will mean cutting some services or finding savings from increases in efficiency.

Remote working has caused financial headaches for other public-transport providers, too. Passenger revenues have fallen by one-third on Britain’s railways as 25% fewer journeys were made last year compared with 2019. That is unlikely to improve what was already an often frustrating experience: just two-thirds of trains ran on time last year and one in every 35 was cancelled altogether. In 2021, a quarter of a century after the railways were privatised, the government announced plans to reform train travel under a new quango called “Great British Railways”. But—as you might have guessed—that, too, has been delayed. ■