Happy holidays! Will Brexit spoil Brits’ vacations — and Rishi Sunak’s summer?

LONDON — Rishi Sunak is desperate to sell the benefits of Brexit. Unfortunately for him, the holiday season is here.

Some Tory MPs fear post-Brexit “annoyances” for Brits this summer — from reintroduced mobile roaming charges to laborious passport checks — may counteract a determined effort by No. 10 Downing Street to convince Brits that the Brexit battles of the past few years have been worth the pain.

“You can construct a long list of things that are annoying,” sighed one former Tory minister, a Remain supporter, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Government should be much better at constructing a list of things that are better … but that is challenging, apparently.”

“We have just signed the CPTPP [Pacific trade deal]. Am I richer? No. You have just spent £10 on roaming charges. Are you poorer? Yes.”

Mobile roaming charges, which are banned within the European Union, have returned on three out of the four major U.K. networks post-Brexit. EE, Vodafone and Three all charge in the region of £2 [€2.31] a day to roam; O2 is the only major U.K. network that has not reintroduced roaming rates.

In a poll conducted earlier this month by Redfield and Wilton Strategies for POLITICO, more than half of those surveyed thought it unreasonable that telephone companies set mobile phone roaming charges for U.K. customers traveling to the European Union.

And it’s not just travelers’ phone bills. British pet lovers now have to obtain an Animal Health Certificate (AHC) if they want to travel to the EU with their dog, cat or ferret.

MPs and travel operators are also praying customs capacity holds up ahead of the great summer getaway this weekend after British schools have broken up for the summer vacations.

News stories about long delays at the Port of Dover, which experienced an 18-hour backlog of school coaches at the start of the Easter holiday, have cast a shadow over Brexit in focus groups, researchers have found.

“Delays forecast in Dover this weekend as well as the introduction of full checks at the border in October will serve to underline for many people the many difficult realities that Brexit now poses for the government. Plus the introduction of roaming charges will inevitably impact people negatively,” Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, said.

Selling Brexit

You won’t hear any such talk from the British prime minister, of course. 

Sunak, who campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, is naturally keen to push back hard against any suggestion Brexit has been a failure, claims now being echoed even by prominent Brexiteers such as Nigel Farage.

In a press release Monday, the U.K. government announced it was seizing “post-Brexit freedoms for the fishing industry” with a new system of fisheries management.

International Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch was on the airwaves on Sunday heralding Britain’s post-Brexit trade tilt towards the Indo-Pacific after the signing of the CPTPP.

On his way to the G7 earlier in the summer, Sunak had made sure to reel off a list of Brexit benefits to the traveling press pack.

“I introduced freeports — a Brexit benefit around the country attracting jobs and investment to lots of different places,” Sunak said. “We cut VAT on sanitary products, we reformed the alcohol duties that mean this summer you will be able to get cheaper beer in pubs. These are all very tangible benefits of Brexit that I’ve already delivered.” 

Jonathan Gullis, a Tory MP and strong supporter of Brexit, insisted roaming charges and pet passport requirements were not being actively raised by voters either on the doorstep or in his inbox, but did acknowledge there would be people “frustrated” by the issues.

Mechanisms to review the trade deal between the EU and U.K. should be used to revisit such issues, he thinks.

Roaming charges “in particular” were something it would be to the “benefit of everyone” to address, and would be an “easy win for both sides,” he said, given some mobile operators have also reintroduced roaming charges for European Union customers traveling to the U.K.

Did they see it coming?

An agreement to end roaming charges inside the European Union had been reached in 2015, a year before Britons voted to leave the European Union.

Remain campaign figurehead David Cameron, U.K. prime minister at the time of the referendum, had warned phone bills could soar if Brits voted to leave the EU, but prominent leave campaigners like Boris Johnson dismissed those concerns.

“There are plenty of other parts of the world where the free market has been driving down the cost of mobile roaming charges and cut-price airline tickets, without the need for a vast supranational bureaucracy,” Johnson said, a month before the 2016 vote.

As PM himself three years later, Johnson would sign the withdrawal agreement that allowed mobile charging to be restored.

But few Brits now remember that debate, according to the latest Redfield and Wilton polling. Their survey conducted earlier this month found three-quarters of Brits thought the return of charges either wasn’t discussed at all in 2016, or simply did not know if it had been a talking point at the time.

For many the extra fees may prove a nasty surprise.

On Thursday, Ofcom floated new rules which would force British mobile operators to tell customers about roaming charges that apply when traveling abroad. The telecoms regulator’s own research found nearly one in five U.K. holidaymakers are unaware they could face extra payments.

At the border

Of more immediate concern in Downing Street this weekend will be the issue of post-Brexit border checks, which dominated headlines during the Easter holidays amid chaos at the Port of Dover.

“While the EU is rarely the first topic that comes in focus groups, if people start talking about holidays, then complaints about the impact of Brexit almost inevitably follow,” said Luke Tryl, U.K. director of the consultancy More in Common, which regularly conducts focus groups around the country to test public opinion.

“These tend to range from minor gripes that we seem to let Europeans use our fast passport gates but they don’t do the same for us anymore, to very real worries about holidays being spoilt trying to get a ferry at Dover.”

In a statement this week, the Port of Dover said it had taken a range of measures, including the reintroduction of advanced passenger checks and the construction of extra border infrastructure, to try to avoid a repeat of the Easter delays.

Giving evidence to a House of Commons select committee on Wednesday, John Keefe, chief corporate affairs officer at Getlink, owner of Eurotunnel, warned this would be the “first real summer of normal traffic after COVID.”

“That means the public are only just coming to terms with the changed border requirements between the U.K. and EU,” he said. “There is already an enhanced level of passport control, the wet stamping of passports, the verification of not overstaying 90 days in 180, which is a question asked to every passenger going through.”

Those requirements could become even more burdensome if the EU’s planned EU Entry/Exit System (EES) comes into force next year, requiring passengers to register biometric data such as fingerprints and facial images the first time they cross the border into the EU.

Saved by the strikes

A second former Tory minister, also a 2016 Remain supporter, feared British passengers “finding friction” at passport control at holiday destinations across Europe “may well be the Brexit story” this summer.

But they also suggested that phenomenon could be overshadowed by waves of strikes in the travel industry, both in the U.K. and abroad.

Nearly 1,000 workers at Gatwick Airport will stage eight days of strikes during the school summer holidays, and air traffic control strikes in Europe could also add to the travel chaos for U.K. holidaymakers.

“I think some of those irritations about Brexit would have been there for everybody to see this summer, but strikes are going to be what people are talking about,” the Tory ex-minister added.

Sunak may be praying his colleague is right.