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After a week of chaos, Kentish roads are eerily deserted, with almost no freight traffic, as truck drivers across the EU avoid Dover and the Eurotunnel as the Brexit transition period ends.
The only reminder of the potential for Brexit chaos is the miles and miles of waste – plastic bottles, shopping bags, and even towels – strewn along the banks of the M20 motorway heading south to the cliffs of Dover.
The government modeled plans for up to 7,000 trucks stuck in Kent in the wake of Brexit trade barriers being lifted at 11pm on the EU side of the canal. But all the evidence suggests that importers have made their reservations and will avoid the port when the UK’s 30-year membership in the single market abruptly ends.
Only a trickle of trucks entered the Eurotunnel, and there appeared to be less than a handful heading to Dover early Thursday night.
Eurotunnel said traffic was normally quiet during the new year; It was exceptionally so this year because many importers had been rushing to bring in supplies before January 1, hence the high levels of traffic that came to a halt when the French imposed a Covid travel ban on freight just before Christmas.
Rod McKenzie, Policy Director for the Road Haulage Association (RHA), said: “I don’t think we’ll start to see things return to normal traffic levels until the second week of January. Even then I believe that true chaos will be invisible chaos.
“People don’t know what paperwork they have to fill out, they haven’t dealt with customs declarations before, and if they don’t fill it out correctly, they don’t get Kent’s access permit to travel to the county, so they will be stuck in warehouses and distribution centers throughout the country. “
The Kent, KAP, or “Kermit” access permit, as it has been called, is mandatory for all drivers who want to cross the English Channel after 11pm on December 31st.
Authorities said only about 450 of these 24-hour permits had been issued so far. The slow recovery was fueling fears that there could be a partial repeat of the pre-Christmas chaos with trucks stopped or ordered to return if they don’t have a Brexit passport in the coming weeks.
Drivers without a permit could be stopped by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency through automatic license plate recognition and possibly fined £ 300, officials said.
The RHA has echoed the concerns, with estimates that 50% or more of small and medium-sized businesses may not be ready for border controls, potentially raising the prospect of chaos in late January when chains supply companies are forced out of Brexit Hibernation.
In Ashford, a few miles north of Dover, the construction buzz continues into the night at the 66-acre truck park intended to be a yard for more than 1,000 vehicles.
Many people in the area are mourning the loss of the fields and their environmental benefits.
“The hills to the left and the valley to the right, you could walk to the village of Mersham. It was lovely to do it on a summer night, but obviously the government had other ideas, ”said Hugh Tyman, who was walking his dog, Willow, in a small development across a freeway that separates residents from the truck park. .
Did you vote to leave the EU? “I supported it, but the politicians didn’t tell us enough about how it would work. Now they’ve made the deal and we don’t know the details either. I probably wouldn’t vote for it now that I know all the paperwork and travel rules are changing, ”he said.
Another local at a farmhouse on an old country lane that skirts the vast site was also upset and said he hoped to get compensation. “My daughter grew up tending corn fields,” she said. “There is a constant hum of generators and it won’t stop after construction because the refrigerated trucks will have the generators running all night. The construction workers had four days off over Christmas, it was just lovely. “
Later, John Lang and his wife, Cherylynn, thought they had bought a rural idyll to retire when The Guardian first told them about the government takeover in July. Like the rest of the neighbors, they said, there were no warnings or inquiries about the truck park.
They lost their 360-degree view of the farmland and are now looking up at a four-meter-high pine-yellow perimeter fence on two sides of their house. “It’s like living in a complex, it’s awful,” Cherylynn said.
John voted for Brexit and said he was optimistic about the future, but didn’t think it would do much for Kent, who voted to leave the EU. “I don’t see what the benefit is for us here in Kent,” he said. He said the trucks were now accidentally passing his country road “because the zip code is the same as the truck park.” I was hoping it would finally be fixed.
Stewart Wickham, a bus driver, was delighted that a business deal had been reached because it meant that the international driver’s permit lottery would no longer threaten his livelihood.
“I just took the GB hockey team to Brussels and Amsterdam, and next week we will find out if we will take them to their winter training camp in Malaga. If there wasn’t a deal, I could have done that, ”he said.
