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

Damian Green Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 General Committees

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

I will briefly make three points. First, the Minister said that Operation Brock was an alternative to Operation Stack; I would much prefer to hear him use the language that it is a replacement for Operation Stack. Operation Brock is an inconvenience in Kent. Operation Stack was a disaster for my constituents and many others in Kent, so I hope that that was merely a linguistic slip.

Two other points arise from the SI. The first is that, as the Minister said, the Government have not had to use Operation Brock since we last passed a similar, though deficient, SI. Therefore I repeat my plea that the signage on motorways, and in particular on local roads, be improved so that lorries are not encouraged by their often old-fashioned sat-nav to go through villages to reach such things as the inland border facility in Sevington in my constituency, which continues to cause distress to those who live in those villages and to my constituents.

My final point, which again I hope the Minister will take away and encourage his officials to look at, is that one benefit of keeping lorries off local roads, and of the new lorry park that was opened in my constituency on Friday by his ministerial colleague, the noble Baroness Vere, is that there is now no excuse for lorries to park overnight in either residential areas or business parks in the area, where they have been wont to park recently, claiming that there are not enough parking spaces. Kent County Council used to have enforcement powers generally across the area against those lorries, but those powers have lapsed. I strongly urge the Department to consider reintroducing them, because that would complete the circle and allow my constituents and others to feel safe from having lorries parked inappropriately in their residential or business areas overnight.