On Friday this week the Department for Transport will publish the details of the final consultation on the delivery of the Operation Stack relief lorry park, at the Stanford West site. The decision over the preferred location for the lorry park has been made by the government and this final consultation concerns the details of how it will be operated when called upon. The consultation will run until 23rd September, and its purpose is to finalise these details for the use of the lorry park, not to re-open the question of its location. The government expects to start work on the construction of the park later this year, and for it to start to enter operation next summer.
This £250million investment from the government into infrastructure in Kent will give us the resilience we need, to make Operation Stack as we have known it a thing of the past. The initial consultation on the lorry park proposals was very clear on this point; Kent residents want an end to the routine closure of the motorway whenever there are significant delays processing lorries at Dover Port and the Channel Tunnel. The majority of people who responded to the consultation earlier this year supported the idea of creating a new lorry park, with less than a quarter thinking Operation Stack should continue in its current form. Whilst some people have claimed that the Channel Tunnel and Dover Port operators don’t want the lorry park, that is only because they would rather have Operation Stack, which suits their needs, but makes life a misery for the people of Kent.
Last summer, it was calculated by the Freight Transport Association that the cost of just one day of Operation Stack to the wider UK economy was £250million. On that basis the cost of building the lorry park could be recouped by saving us from just one day of Operation Stack. In reality, the lorry park will practically eliminate Stack altogether. The lorry park has been designed to hold all of the vehicles that are held in phases one and two of Operation Stack; these require the closure of the coast bound sections of the M20 between junction 8 and 9, and 10 and 11. Until last summer, we had never seen anything more that Phases 1 and 2 of Operation Stack put into use, and even then, in the worst crisis on our roads that we have ever seen, we only required more capacity to park lorries for a few days.
When Operation Stack had been brought into force over the last few years, it often comes with little advance notice, and for different reasons. Fire in the Channel Tunnel, bad weather preventing ships leaving Dover, strike action in France, increased security in response to an international incident have all caused delays. If we do not create the infrastructure that allows us to deal with queueing vehicles, whilst also keeping our motorways and local roads open for traffic, then we have to accept that the misery of Stack will continue. Now at last, we have a solution that is ready to be deployed.