Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 1) (Amendment) Order 2020

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this short debate, and I congratulate the Minister on at least updating previous documentation and giving us a sight of what will be needed for the next six months or, probably, a year. It is all highly complex, as other noble Lords have said. I declare an interest as a member of the EU Goods Sub- Committee. We have taken evidence from many of the people involved in this flow issue over the last two or three weeks, including Unite the Union and many of the business groups whose members get involved in it.

The situation is really serious, from what I understand. I shall not repeat what other noble Lords have said, but I hope we will get a comprehensive response from the Minister when she winds up—or at least she could, perhaps, write to us afterwards. I have always thought that one of our problems is that we spend a lot of time talking—quite rightly—about what is going to happen in Kent, but very little time talking about what is happening on the other side of the channel. That is before we even get to the Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland situation.

We recently took evidence from the Port of Rotterdam and the Port of Calais. They were very polite about us, as you would expect, but I got the distinct impression from the representative of the Port of Rotterdam that they thought that everything on their side of the water would be all right, but they did not have much of a clue about what will happen on our side. The message they were getting from their colleagues was that the situation was—shall we say—confused. They probably would have been rather ruder if they had not been giving evidence to our committee.

On that issue, perhaps the Minister could explain the location of the controls between Dover and Calais. This applies to trucks going in both directions. We have heard that the French immigration—or emigration—people will deal with the drivers’ DIT work before they get onto the ferry. However, we then heard that, in fact, the French customs and immigration people would deal with incoming freight at Dover. As the Port of Dover told us, there is no room there—that is a minor detail. We need to know where all the different controls will take place and in both directions. That applies if and when Manston and Sevington and all the other places come into force, because of traffic jams. On the Calais side, there is much more space, but I would like to know where every control is taking place there.

This leads me on to a subject on which many noble Lords have spoken: the location of restrooms—some people call them restrooms; I call them toilets. Where will they be? Again, we got some rather sad evidence from Highways England, which is responsible for motorways in Kent. It is good to know that there will be portakabins and good facilities in Sevington and Manston, but the problem is that, going down the motorway, there are four lanes on the M20 and there might be a situation where there are two lanes in one direction and two lanes in the other, but it is difficult to know where you could put even a portaloo down there. You cannot really put them on the verge, because people will stop on the hard shoulder and, when they are moving, that is highly dangerous. Of course, once they have stopped and there is a traffic jam that lasts for goodness knows how many hours, where will the facilities be? It is very hard to solve, unless portakabins are to be airlifted in, which sounds pretty stupid. We need some answers

My second question for the Minister is about enforcement, mentioned by my noble friend Lord Snape. When stopping a truck, or even going up to a stopped truck, and dealing with the kind of fines mentioned by my noble friend—the £300 and everything—the first question is: who is liable to pay it? Is it the driver? Is it the forwarder? Is it the owner of the goods, the owner of the tractor unit or the owner of the trailer? All of these could well be different people. How long does it take a police officer to administer a fine or a charge? As my noble friend said, £300 is a lot of money. Where are they going to stop the trucks to do it? I do not know whether the Minister has an answer to this question, but I suspect that the answer is that this will not be done—they cannot do it because they do not have enough people. Then, we will get into a really chaotic situation.

I echo previous noble Lords in saying that we have known about this for four years. We had hoped that the single market would allow a freer flow of goods, but there were going to have to be some checks somewhere. There will be checks not just at Dover and the Channel Tunnel but at ports all the way up and down the country, to which drivers may well want to divert to avoid reported jams at Dover and the Channel Tunnel. Are we in a situation where we are going to get chaos everywhere? If so, it is we and our businesses who will lose out.

From having talked to many of the firms involved, I know that, in spite of the fact that we may have 80% of the drivers and trucks coming from eastern Europe and being driven for eastern European companies, if they get held up too much, none of the people or customers will want to try that again. As a consequence, the big and small firms that use these services to move their goods across borders several times in the course of manufacture may well say, “Enough’s enough, we’re going to move it all to the continent”. I hope that I am wrong, but we have to get this right, and at the moment the industry clearly does not think that we have. I look forward to the Minister’s response.