Lorries face two-mile tailbacks as 'Brexit checks to blame' for Dover delays
25 January 2022, 20:05
Lorries face two-mile tailbacks on A20 to Dover 'sparked by Brexit checks'
Lorries are continuing to face tailbacks at Dover, which have been 'sparked by new Brexit checks'.
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Queues went back for approximately two miles on the A20 to Dover on Tuesday evening, just days after tailbacks surpassed nine miles and were visible from space.
Fresh delays at the port this month have been blamed on extra controls which came into place following Brexit, with checks needed for the government's new Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS) system and other export paperwork said to be the cause.
It has been claimed by people involved in the operation that it now takes between 10 and 20 minutes to process the required paperwork for every single truck.
And with further checks set to come in later in the year, port chiefs have urged the government to hold talks with the EU on ways to ease the process.
Multiple witnesses shared footage on social media of the queues, blaming Brexit red tape for causing delays.
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And what happens behind is this . This is a short queue but none the less - will take many hours to board a ferry . Imagine the queues when they are ten miles long pic.twitter.com/mugHYKtW1J
— ciaran the euro courier 🇪🇺🇮🇪 (@vanmaneuro) January 21, 2022
Earlier this month one witness who drove past the queues wrote online: "30km of lorry queues at Calais yesterday, the same at Dover. Seamless trade anyone?"
Another person posted a video of a car driving past a seemingly endless queue of trucks, writing: "Here’s the queues into Dover: who’d have thought having to process export docs at the border would create such delays."
However, others have instead blamed the tailbacks on a spike in freight traffic.
A Port of Dover spokesperson previously said: "[The Dover] Traffic Assessment Project (TAP) is a well-established and regularly used normal operational tool to help manage traffic flows into the Port of Dover at busy times and it has been for a number of years.
"This was the case yesterday [Friday] as it has been similarly over the past few days."
The tactic means a 40mph speed restriction is enforced on the A20 approaching Dover, with lorry drivers heading for the port being expected to remain in the left lane, closing it off to other traffic.
