Draft Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 1) Order 2019

Marcus Fysh Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 General Committees

[Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

May I ask a couple of questions? What processing capacity does the Minister expect for HGVs in the junction area of the M20 that he mentioned? I am concerned about whether that is enough.

Secondly, what facilities will be available at the places where the documents are being inspected so that HGVs with loads can become compliant and Brexit-ready by virtue of obtaining, for example, a transit accompanying document? Where they can offer the load up to be inspected, should HMRC wish it to be?

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[Charlie Elphicke]

I appreciate that, Mr Hanson. My hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell tempts me to talk about the importance of making sure that the traffic flows, even when there are demonstrations. That is part of the reason why we need these traffic officers. If someone comes to Dover and glues themselves to the roads, as the Extinction Rebellion people did the other day, it creates a problem. We want to have the powers for people to ensure that the roads are kept open and free.

The key point that I am trying to make about traffic officers is that we will need fewer traffic officers and fewer powers provided that we make sure that we are entirely ready for a smooth Brexit, using the transit convention and making sure that HMRC has done its bit. To conclude, the ideal would be that clearances were done at the factory floor, which is possible, using the transit convention and making sure that HMRC is fully ready, rather than checks at Manston.

My other concern is that the Government’s idea of using Manston is problematic. Let us say that Stanislav from Krakow is driving a lorry—many lorry drivers are from eastern Europe and do not have the best grasp of English, but they know where the port of Dover and the M20 are. They will head there come hell or high water. The problem is how on earth we are going to tell them to go somewhere else. How on earth can we tell them that they should sit at Manston and be there, potentially, for days on end?

[Mr Fysh]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I, too, have very serious concerns about the idea of Manston featuring at all in a solution to this, which is why the capacity issue for the processing en route is so important. I think there is a serious danger that if EU hauliers—after all, 80% to 85% are from the EU—find that inconvenient and get fined £300 unless they go to Manston, and that completely upsets their schedules and working time allowances which will get them to a certain point in Europe, they may abandon the route entirely.

[Charlie Elphicke]

That is my prime concern—to make sure that the traffic is free-flowing. The focus really ought to be on making sure that HMRC is ready to give the clearances from the factory floor, rather than on producing a situation at Manston. I am concerned, as are many colleagues in Kent, that if the procedures aimed at directing lorry drivers to Manston are implemented, it will be very hard to persuade lorry drivers for whom English is not their first language to go elsewhere. That is my one concern about this.

I broached this subject because I want Brexit to succeed—unlike the Labour party, which wants to cancel it and to remain under all circumstances. I want Brexit to succeed, so we have put forward solutions to make the best advantage of the transit convention and avoid the need for quite so many traffic officers.

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[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Yes. That is a legitimate question about what would happen should Folkestone and Dover get very busy. My personal belief is that if I was running a business—I used to import wholesale fruit and veg for a living, and I have used the short straits crossing a huge amount in the past for my business—and was worried about there being a problem, I would divert my route. That is why the Government have already announced that an extra £9 million is being made available to local areas and major ports, so that they are ready for us to leave without a deal. Some £5 million of that will be given to local councils that either have or are near major air, land or sea ports, to ensure that they can continue to operate effectively when we leave the EU. We have also done the traffic modelling and shared it with the local resilience forums in each of those individual areas, and we are working with them to ensure that they are completely ready for when we leave the European Union later this month. It is a completely legitimate and fair question, and I appreciate the hon. Lady’s asking it, so that I could clarify that point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell asked me a vaguely political question, but there was a sensible question within it: are hauliers taking this seriously? It is not that the political question was not sensible; I just do not want to be told off by you, Mr Hanson, tempted though I may be to leap in. I can honestly say that hauliers are taking this seriously. I have been in lots and lots of meetings with both business representatives and organisations of the freight and haulage industry, and indeed with big and small individual companies, and they all understand what impact this might have if it were to go wrong. They all understand that if they and everybody else get the paperwork right, there would not be the problem we are discussing and we would not need the contingency plan—Brock—because flow would continue. We need to continue—we will do this as a Government and, I hope, as individual Members —to say to anybody we meet from a haulage company, “Are you Brexit-ready?” The Government should have written to them a number times through different Departments, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and so on. They should have seen the adverts that have been in the papers and on motorway gantries. There are pop-up sites up and down the country, and we are using the trade press. They have all sorts of opportunities to notice them. It is their living.

I used to work with the haulage industry, importing fruit and veg, and I know that, although hauliers put things off to the last minute because they do not want to take on board the extra expense, when they know that it is about their livelihood and those of the people who work for them—they might be a small operator with one or two rigs—they take notice. They do not want to be held up. There are not massive margins in the haulage industry, so delay costs could cost them business and therefore profit, or their living. I believe that they are absolutely taking this very seriously.

[Mr Fysh]

The Minister is being very generous in giving way. Was he going to come back to my question about whether there will be facilities for hauliers to undertake customs-readiness en route? My concern is that if the capacity fills up in Folkestone, Dover and Ashford—where there are customs processing facilities where they can get their documents right in the evenings when they fill up with the hauliers from Europe who want to stay the night—there will potentially need to be some en route capacity in the areas where the trucks are being held; otherwise, they will have to divert to different places, and they will not want to.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Although that is not necessarily part of this debate, I would like to answer it. I mentioned, but probably did not emphasise enough, that we are looking at changing the very popular pop-up sites that we have for this basic communications campaign—the ones where we get a huge amount of footfall—so they can check the paperwork, as my hon. Friend describes, and inform drivers about whether they are border-ready and have the appropriate paperwork. If they get into Kent, there are turnaround sites, which HMRC is setting up, on top of the numbers that I mentioned in my previous answer to my hon. Friend. For people who believe that they can get ready to cross the border within 24 hours, there will be facilities for them to do so.

I apologise for not addressing the question that my hon. Friend asked about facilities. He asked what the facilities will be for drivers and others if we are doing all this. There will be facilities—we will ensure that we look after drivers’ welfare properly—that include toilets and food. At Maidstone, there will be things like access to the internet and printers, so if paperwork needs to be checked and changed, drivers have the ability to do that. We are very cognisant of the welfare of drivers in that industry, which is very important to our nation.