The information from the DfT comes in response to a letter from retired lorry driver Sebastian Barrow, who has long been campaigning for improvements to the HGV driver welfare situation in Kent. Last year, Mr Barrow successfully spearheaded a campaign to have the HGV parking ban in the county scrapped, much to the relief of a number of truck drivers.
In recent times, Mr Barrow has been writing to numerous officials regarding the difficulties HGV drivers are experiencing in Kent, whether it be a lack of parking capacity, long queues or insufficient welfare facilities.
In the letter from the DfT, which Mr Barrow made public via social media, the DfT representative expressed regret over the recent freight traffic disruption in Kent, condemned the actions of P&O, and summed up the government’s plans to improve HGV driver facilities across the country. Much of the content of the letter, including the plans for new and better facilities, has already been made public by the DfT and has been covered on this website.
However, there are a couple of takeaways from the response that are worthy of note.
One of those is an apparent rejection of the testimonies from lorry drivers that they had waited in queues for longer than 30 hours. Reacting to Mr Barrow’s comments on the reports of 32-hour queuing times, the DfT representative replied: “we have not received any intelligence supporting the claim of 32 hours queues”.
The DfT response also stresses that “additional resilience measures” beyond Operation Brock “had a positive impact in maintaining throughput to the ports and keeping local roads moving and as we speak have congestion has significantly reduced.”
The most interesting excerpt of the letter nonetheless concerns facilities. Lorry drivers stuck in lengthy Operation Brock queues have repeatedly taken issue with the fact that almost no sanitary facilities have been provided.
Unfortunately, the DfT response does not offer much hope that this situation will change.
The representative writes that “welfare plans are in place, with bottled water and food parcels pre-deployed to key points”. However, the letter then continues as follows:
“When there are queues in continuous movement it is too dangerous to deploy toilet facilities and equally dangerous for hauliers to leave their vehicles and cross a lane of moving HGVs to use the toilets. The alternative is to stop all traffic and deploy the toilets, then stop all traffic at regular intervals to allow their use which would exacerbate the traffic congestion issues.”
Therefore, it appears unlikely that additional sanitary facilities will be provided on the M20 for lorry drivers, even if Operation Brock queues continue to become a fairly regular occurrence.