Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 2) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2021

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 General Committees

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

I have a couple of points, mostly to reiterate what my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford said.

A couple of years ago, the Government allowed the use of map data from Ordnance Survey to be made available to the mapping software that underpins many GPS systems. We had a particular problem in Sandwich some years ago, which was always deemed to be the quickest route when lorry drivers, particularly foreign ones, were using free Google-type map data. At times it looked like going through the middle of Sandwich was the easiest route. I am pleased to report that there seems to have been an improvement on that, and we are not seeing that issue like we used to.

I understand that the purpose of the draft order is just to put right what should not have been wrong in the first place, but in easy language, does this permit the police and other authorities in the case of Operation Brock to use their powers to stop what might be called rat running? Could they force or cajole—I suppose force, as it has a statutory basis—traffic moving through Kent just to those roads so specified? That would be helpful. That is how I understood it, but I have not tried to interleave this order with the existing statutory instruments that it replaces.