British passport holders without EU citizenship will face new border controls and have to pay £6 every time they travel to and from the bloc from this November under the rules of the new ‘Entry-Exit System’ or EES system.
British passport holders will also soon be subjected to fingerprinting and face checks in order to travel to the European Union as part of a new digitised checkpoint system. This could cause massive delays with the new system rumoured to take “up top four times longer” than the current system.
The new system means that non-European citizens, including Britons, will have to get their fingerprints and a facial biometric analysed every time they enter and leave the bloc.
Up until this point, UK tourists have only needed stamps at each entry and exit point within the free-travel Schengen Zone to show that they have not overstayed the limits of their visa.
The UK requested to be included in the new system as part of the Brexit deal after contributing to its development while a member of the EU.
Irish citizens and other residents of the European Union are not affected.
The 27 Schengen countries include Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
In a statement, the European Commission’s Department for Migration and Home Affairs said: “EES will replace the current system of manual stamping of passports, which is time-consuming, does not provide reliable data on border crossings and does not allow a systematic detection of overstayers.”
