Yann Leriche, chief executive of Getlink, has a blunt diagnosis for why Europe’s new biometric border regime is still not running end to end at the Channel Tunnel. The problem, he says, is not the terminals, the staff, or the queues, it is the code.

Getlink, which operates the Eurotunnel shuttle carrying cars and lorries between Folkestone and Calais, warned on Thursday that unresolved software problems in the EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES) could delay the rollout of biometric checks for passenger vehicles. The caution came alongside the company’s half-year results.

“I’m not going to tell you that we aren’t experiencing any difficulties at all, because there’s one issue that affects us all and for which there is no obvious immediate solution: the software provided by the European Union,” Leriche told reporters.

The system, he added, “was not yet fully stable”.

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The EES is the bloc’s long-delayed digital border, designed to log every non-EU traveller entering or leaving the Schengen area by recording facial images, fingerprints, and passport data in place of a manual stamp.

It belongs to the same push toward automated identity checks that produced Eurostar’s biometric corridor at St Pancras and a run of facial verification trials at airports.

After years of postponement, the system began a phased rollout in October 2025 and was declared fully operational across all Schengen external borders on 10 April 2026.

By the end of March it had processed more than 45 million crossings and refused entry to over 24,000 people.

At the Channel Tunnel, though, one piece is still missing. Biometric registration for people travelling by car has not been switched on, and the next milestone for that phase falls on 6 September.

Leriche’s warning is that the EU-supplied software may not be ready to hold the date. Miss it, and the fallback is more manual processing, more contingency planning, and another round of terminals kitted out for a feature they cannot yet run.

It would not be the first slip. Earlier in 2026, France paused biometric registration at Channel crossings, citing software glitches, and border police fell back on processing car passengers by hand without collecting their biometrics.

Pre-registration kiosks and tablets at French ports had failed, and a system built around airport passenger flows strained against the volumes moving through tunnel and ferry terminals.

The rollout was designed with room for exactly this. Member states can partially suspend biometric collection for up to 90 days while systems bed in, with a further 60-day extension available to cover the summer peak.

In practice that has meant travellers still hand over a passport and, at some crossings, receive a stamp, while facial images and fingerprints are captured only where the technology is judged ready. The result is a border that is legally uniform on paper but patchy in operation.

Getlink has spent heavily to be ready for a system it does not control. The company invested €80 million preparing its terminals, installing 224 biometric kiosks across Folkestone and Calais, adding border lanes, and hiring 140 staff.

The civil works at both Coquelles and Folkestone are finished; what is not finished is the software running on top of them.

For all the friction, disruption at the tunnel has stayed within bounds. Leriche said queues had been held to one or two hours, comfortably shorter than the delays reported at some airports over the same period.

Cars register at kiosks inside the terminal before boarding rather than at a booth, which spreads the load across the site.

The awkwardness for Brussels is one of sequencing. The EES is now legally live everywhere in the Schengen area, part of a wider architecture of digital borders that also includes a forthcoming digital ID wallet.

Whether it works everywhere is a separate question, and for now the answer sits less with the operators paying to run it than with the vendor writing the code.