Manchester students among thousands stuck for over 18 HOURS in Dover delay chaos

University students from Manchester were among thousands of others forced to endure waits of eighteen hours at Dover as severe delays caused chaos.

The port of Dover, which declared a critical incident, said the hold-ups were 'due to lengthy French border processes and sheer volume' after the severe traffic delays began on Friday (March 31) and continued throughout the weekend.

Groups of university students from across the country, including from Manchester, were among those forced to sit in a slow moving queue of coaches, go without food or water for hours on end and in some cases miss an entire day of their trips due to the major hold ups.

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One frustrated dad, Chris Sparks, whose daughter is a first year student at Manchester Metropolitan University and had booked her travels with a sports tour company, has told of the 'emotional' scenes she has described at the port and how she was initially meant to reach Croatia at 9am on Sunday morning - but has still not arrived.

"They left Manchester at around 3am on Saturday morning at got to the services at Dover for around 9.30am. They are using the services as a holding area essentially, where coach drivers are told to wait there before making their way to the port," he said.

"They were already worried before leaving because some of the coaches from the day before had been completely cancelled. At the services, there were still people that had been abandoned there from the night before.

"By about 12 o'clock they were approaching the buffer zone. It still took three hours just to get from the services to the port, and then they had to turn around because the coach driver was