In the first of a new series, Lisa O’Carroll joins a British driver to navigate the ‘frictionless trade’ of the French port

Simon Wilkinson, a British lorry driver, is surveying about 1,000 lorries amassing at the “queue for the queue” about half a mile from a French port. “This is frictionless trade on a Thursday afternoon in Calais,” he said.

Wilkinson runs a small haulage company in Kent that specialises in transporting frozen food. Like all hauliers, he is looking ahead to the possibility of a no-deal Brexit – and the customs and animal checks that could come with it – with some trepidation. “This is what it is like before you throw the spanner in the works,” he pointed out.

About 15 minutes earlier, Wilkinson took a detour from his pickup point in Belgium to see the site earmarked by France for the new border inspection post, where food and animals coming from the UK will be subjected to mandatory health checks.

But at the port’s planned border inspection post, no work has been done. It is an open field off the A16, the main road between Dunkirk and Calais, where there is no hard shoulder but there is evidence of people recently living on verges, where rain-sodden duvets and clothes are compacted into the dirt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon Wilkinson runs Harrier Express, a Kent haulage company, and is worried about what Brexit might bring. Photograph: Sean Smith/Guardian

As we head to the port of Calais, the scale of the commercial operation unfolds, with lorries grinding to a halt in the “buffer zone” ahead of the four controls before the ferry.

Hard-sided refrigerated lorries are segregated from soft-sided curtain trailers, which range from small lorries carrying goods ordered the night before on Amazon and eBay to 44-tonne vehicles such as Wilkinson’s, which is carrying 24 tonnes of frozen vegetables from Belgium destined for British pubs, restaurants and schools.

After one-and-a-half hours snaking through a sea of lorries, we get to the weighbridge – the first check – then the “heartbeat machine”, which checks for stowaways, followed by British and French immigration controls, and finally a shipping office to register for the next available ferry.

There we will wait a further two-and-a-half hours. That we are queueing up with 11 other lorries in lane 155 – one of more than 500 lanes – illustrates how big a pinch point Calais is in the supply chain that keeps Britain’s car plants moving and supermarket shelves full.

Profile Dover to Calais in numbers Show Hide Number of ferries crossing channel a day: 50

Dove's share of UK trade: 17% or £122bn Number of lorries going through Dover per year: 2.6m Number of lorries going through Calais per year: 2m Lorries going through Dover-Calais a day: 6,000 -10,000 Photograph: Sean Smith

“I wanted to make it common knowledge how congested Calais already is. It runs smoothly, but sometimes you can wait up to nine hours,” said Wilkinson.

“This is pure luck it only took an hour-and-a-half. A few hours later and it would be gridlock,” added Wilkinson, who runs a fleet of refrigerated lorries from Kent across the Channel every day, then brings food back.

For tourists accustomed to rolling on and off cross-Channel ferries, this is another world.

“When people complain that delays in Dover are going to impact their holiday plans, that’s small beer,” Wilkinson said. “This is my living 365 days a year.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lorries in the ‘queue for the queue’ before customs checks at the port of Calais in France. Photograph: Sean Smith/Guardian

Wilkinson runs a fleet of 18 lorries at Harrier Express, employing 25 drivers. A day’s delay costs him £400 per lorry and potentially more if frozen cargo is left to rot at the side of the road.

What frustrates and angers him the most is the disconnect between Westminster and hauliers on daily business on the border – the Brexit frontline.

“At Manston, what on earth were we doing?” asked Wilkinson, referring to the recent government trial at a disused airport in Kent of an emergency traffic system in the event of Brexit gridlock in Dover.

“What were we doing? We were planning for failure, we are planning for walking off the plank – and why? We have really serious people like [the bank of England governor] Mark Carney, or Mr BMW or Mr JLR [Jaguar Land Rover], who employ tens of thousands of people, warning the government if you do this [leave the EU without a deal] then our business is going to relocate, but why aren’t they getting the credibility in the debate?” he asked.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The site of the planned border inspection post in Calais, where work has yet to begin. Photograph: Sean Smith/Guardian

In the event of a no-deal Brexit, French authorities have warned a two-minute delay at the border could lead to 27,000 vehicles queuing on both sides of the Channel.

With so much uncertainty, Wilkinson is making his own contingency plans, and has been trialling a new route from Zeebrugge to Purfleet with “unaccompanied” lorries – where one driver takes a lorry to the ferry and another drives it off at the other end.

But he has discovered it will mean a 20% drop in his daily freight capacity because of the extra time involved. He would also have to set up a company in Belgium to run a fleet of drivers for the “unaccompanied” loads, an action that is far trickier than it is in the UK.

“But I’m hoping that we won’t be sitting on any motorways anywhere, that there will be proper lorry parking with toilets,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dominic Salvatori, Jon Slack and Simon Wilkinson, all lorry drivers, on a ferry from Calais to Dover. Photograph: Sean Smith/Guardian

Between 6,000 and 10,000 trucks cross the Channel every day, and all checks – bar those of passports and for fraud and smuggling – are carried out on the French side because of limited space at the cliff-edged port of Dover.

While Brexiters have said Britain can choose to keep checks on goods and food to a minimum, those in the business are sure this will not be the case in the long term.

“We are getting ready for not just day one [of] no deal,” said a French political source. “We are working on the basis that checks might also be done on food going into Britain eventually, and because there is no space in Dover, that it might be done [on the] French side.”

But the best-laid plans could be undone by language issues, with knock-on delays as haulage is now dominated by Polish and Romanian-licensed lorries, with many drivers unable to speak French or English. In time, Wilkinson and his colleagues fear, queues of 1,000 lorries may seem a lot shorter than they do today.