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

Lord Snape Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the orders. However, she did so somewhat blithely, as if these were a couple of routine matters that could swiftly be disposed of—whereas, as my noble friend Lord Pendry outlined, we are talking about events that will have an enormous impact on the county of Kent and elsewhere.

There are also some radical departures from what has been accepted as normal policing in the United Kingdom. I refer the Minister to the explanatory memorandum issued with the orders, and especially to paragraph 6.1, which mentions

“a financial penalty deposit of £300 to be taken immediately at the roadside from a person without a United Kingdom address who is believed to have committed the offence of contravening the new restrictions”.

This is a vast departure from our normal procedure. The Police Federation has for many years been emphatic about the police’s desire not to be seen as fine collectors on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. I wonder what conversations have taken place with the federation about these proposals. Can the Minister tell us whether there are any other motoring offences that involve the police habitually stopping motorists at the roadside and given them on-the-spot fines? I know that happens in other parts of the world, but it does not happen in the United Kingdom.

Three hundred pounds is a not insubstantial sum. How many lorry drivers drive around the United Kingdom with £300 in their back pocket? Maybe there will be other arrangements. Will Visa be acceptable, or perhaps PayPal? Will people have to use a mobile phone to arrange a transfer from a bank account? Have these proposals, and their impact on the ground, been thought through?

Who will administer all this? The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, spoke about the number of heavy goods vehicles that could be involved under the orders, but when I looked online, the Kent road police unit appeared to consist of about 100 officers. Are they to be deployed entirely on Operation Brock, or are they still expected to carry out their other duties? Has the police and crime commissioner for Kent been consulted about the deployment of the police in this way? The Explanatory Memorandum mentions 5,000 or 6,000 lorries. That will be no small task for police documentation checks. Traffic officers are specifically mentioned in the Explanatory Memorandum, but this is difficult to envisage with only 100 traffic officers. If they are to be deployed entirely on Operation Brock checks, what will happen to road policing generally in that part of the United Kingdom?

The documentation issue was barely mentioned. The Government have talked about recruiting 50,000 extra customs officers to deal with the documents. Perhaps the Minister can tell us how many of those customs officers have actually been recruited, as we come to finally leaving the European Union.

Her Majesty’s Government are supposed to be producing a driver’s explanatory handbook to explain all these regulations to drivers. It is going to be in 18 languages. So far, we have not even seen one in English; I cannot speak about the other 17. Can the Minister tell us when this handbook is to be produced, bearing in mind that we are only a few weeks away from its being necessary?

The Road Haulage Association—the very people most involved in these matters—has been fairly scathing about the Government’s preparatory work in the run-up to 31 December, recently describing the proposals as “incomplete” and “inadequate”, and using terms such as “total incompetence”. Those are the RHA’s words, not mine. It is not exactly thrilled by the prospect. Have the trade unions—especially Unite, which is responsible for the organisation of lorry drivers in the United Kingdom—expressed an opinion? What are their views about the proposals?

The figure of 5,000 to 7,500 lorries has been mentioned. If I may digress a moment from the actual orders, while remaining on the subject of cross-channel traffic, I can tell noble Lords that 30 years ago, those of us who supported the Channel Tunnel were assured that one of its enormous benefits would be that, for the first time in this small country, there would be the opportunity for long rail freight hauls right across Europe. Many of us looked forward to seeing those trans-European freight trains. But now, 25 years after the tunnel opened, when 1.2 million lorries per year use the Eurotunnel railway merely as a shuttle to get between our country and the continent, how many freight trains are scheduled every 24 hours? Six. There is a slight imbalance there, and given the likely chaos foreseen not just by me but by lots of other people, I hope the Minister and her department will look again at that imbalance between international road and rail freight, and see what can be done.

Funnily enough, the ports of Dover and Folkestone, and many other affected parts of the United Kingdom, were the areas that voted most heavily for Brexit in the referendum. They may find that “getting their country back” means that their county is likely to be choked by a torrent of heavy goods vehicles going nowhere, and their areas will be considerably affected by the carbon deposits that the vehicles will leave. Pollution and congestion could well be the outcome of these two orders.