Baroness Coussins
Main Page: Baroness Coussins (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Coussins's debates with the Department for Transport
(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Coussins (CB)
My Lords, reports last November said that one reason for incoming lorries being stuck at Dover was that drivers from Lithuania, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere could not understand the customs forms, as they were only in English. The Minister told me in a Written Answer that the DfT road haulage handbook was being translated into 13 other languages, starting with Welsh, Polish and Romanian. Are the other 10 translations now complete and available? Other DfT measures include the multilingual incident reporting line. Have all these initiatives had the intended effect and eased the logjam attributable to language barriers?
An answer I had from the Treasury sadly did not reveal the same foresight: customs declarations are available in only English and Welsh, with no plans for translated or bilingual versions. Will the Minister speak to Treasury colleagues to see whether best practice by her department might be copied there too?