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

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 General Committees

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson, as we debate this order. I look forward to debating further episodes in this trilogy. I also welcome the Minister to his place.

The Government are not shying away from taking us off a cliff edge with a no-deal Brexit, and I note that at this eleventh hour they are still bringing forward legislation to try to prevent chaos at our borders and far deeper into Kent. The delay in bringing forward the legislation does not just predict chaos in Kent but highlights chaos in Government in not being well prepared for their no-deal Brexit.

In the light of the risks already highlighted under Operation Brock, further legislation is before us today to highlight extended powers of traffic officers to direct traffic through congestion. Operation Brock provides for a contra-flow queuing system on the M20 at junctions 8 and 9, a lorry park at Manston airfield and, if necessary, holding traffic on the M26.

Paragraph 2 of the order forms the essence of this instrument, where a traffic officer may require a person driving a heavy goods vehicle to provide documentation of the origin and destination of their journey, as well as documentation relating to the goods on board. That must all be visibly displayed. That is a form of border check at a non-border. In addition, the traffic officer can then direct the vehicle to a specific route or waiting area and guard against the routes it is meant to travel along, unless it is local traffic or the lorry is refuelling.

That is clearly to stop the minor roads of Kent from snarling up and to enable non-HGV traffic to flow on major routes. Through that process, officers will also determine whether certain consignments proceed to the channel tunnel or ports, or not. That highlights how consignments of food or medicines could be seriously compromised should the powers in this statutory instrument be required. Manufacturers of goods should also be concerned that goods could be seriously delayed at the borders.

The order would give powers to the traffic officers to inspect documentation. Failure to provide that, or being in breach of directions given, could result in the driver receiving a summary conviction with a penalty of £300. The legislation is due to come in, possibly by the day after 31 October, and it will remain law until December 2020. I seek clarification from the Minister that that date is to coincide with the end of the transition period, as it currently is in law.

The legislation is a fall-back position for times of severe disruption. Even the threat of that proves the scale of the risk that border chaos could cause. The vast majority of goods flow through Kent, but are similar provisions being made around other ports in the UK, including the enhanced powers of traffic officers? If so, which ports?

How will traffic officers police the process? How many more will be deployed in Kent to manage the process? Will new officers be recruited or will officers be transferred from other places?

The Minister also referred to DVSA staff. Will more DVSA staff be recruited? I know the service is already under severe staffing pressure. If traffic proves to be more severe than set out in the order, do the Government plan to bring forward further legislation? Again, that is unclear. The order highlights the serious risks associated with a no-deal Brexit, and for that reason Labour is focused on ensuring that the Government take it off the table.

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[Chris Heaton-Harris]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point; I will get feedback from officials on the point of law. We are doing everything, but we are completely open; if he or other Kent MPs, or others from the Kent Resilience Forum, believe that there are other things that we can do to make the process simpler and more helpful and to keep things fluid within the county, we are completely up for looking at those suggestions, but we do believe that the contingency measures will be enough to deal with the levels of lorries, on which I have some numbers for my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil in a moment.

Highways England has recruited staff for the checks and the DVSA will be deploying 130 officers, 60 of whom will come from outside Kent—there will be a lot of people surged into the Kent area for this process. I would very much like to think that that is welcomed by Kent.

[Rachael Maskell]

I thank the Minister for the clarity on the number of additional staff who will be deployed to Kent. Are those people being transferred from other functions and elsewhere in the UK or are they new, additional staff?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

It is a bit of both. Some are new staff being recruited and some are being transferred from other functions across the United Kingdom.

I hope I have answered most of the questions; I will come back to my hon. Friend the Member for Dover on those I have not. We have a forum later today with Kent MPs and I will have the answers to any questions I have not answered.

My hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil asked me what we are doing to make lorries compliant. I hope I answered that in my comments on the comms campaign. We hope to be using the pop-up sites to tell drivers that they are border-ready. Currently, the message is about making sure that they understand what they need to do. Where the sites are popular and being used properly, and when we get to 1 November, we hope to move on to messages around, “Yes, actually that is a border-ready document; you should move down to Kent and you shouldn’t have too much of an issue to maintain flow.”

I want to give hon. Members a rough idea of the numbers of vehicles that could be in the Brock process in Kent. The slip road at Eurotunnel has capacity for 450 vehicles. The holding area at the Port of Dover has capacity for roughly 1,100 vehicles. The capacity of Brock M20 will be up to 2,000. Manston airfield will hold around 5,800. The Dover traffic access protocol has capacity of about 300, and if we needed it, the Brock M26 would hold 1,700 or so vehicles.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point. To answer his earlier point, and hopefully this point at the same time, he is quite right to say that designated traffic officers can work on local roads, but they are mainly meant to be relieving problems on the strategic road network. However, we are considering designating Kent County Council officers to support Brock in this circumstance—it is not Dover Council, which I think is where his question came from, but Kent County Council officers. I hope that is of some assistance to him.

I want to finish on a couple of additional points that the hon. Member for York Central raised. She made a point on the timing and asked why the plan was timed to end at the end of December 2020. It is actually nothing to do with the transition period; it is when the planning permission allowing us to mount the operation at Manston finishes. It is about planning; it is not about any transition period should we get a deal. Why is it so important that it is done in Kent? Well, 80% of the UK’s freight goes through the Kent ports—a big percentage of our trade goes through them.

[Rachael Maskell]

If there is serious congestion at Folkestone and Dover ports, haulage companies will look to other locations through which to cross the channel or the North sea. Are discussions under way about contingencies in those areas, should they become the key route that traffic flows through in the future?

[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.