Brexit’s £100m Lorry Parks

The UK spent at least £100m building and closing inland Brexit border facilities that never reached operational use, according to HMRC figures reported by The Guardian. Five of seven sites in England and Wales never made it to service after ministers repeatedly changed how far checks on EU goods would go.

That is the useful number: £100m on facilities that, in practical terms, became very expensive placeholders. In government accounting, “built but not used” has a talent for sounding less absurd than it is.

The largest single example was the so-called Dover white cliffs site near Guston, where HMRC data released under the Freedom of Information Act showed £28m of public money spent even though the site remains a field. The Department for Transport paid £21m to procure it and another £7m on early ground works, including an archaeological survey.

The Birmingham site cost £17m, including £6m in closure costs. Warrington and Ebbsfleet together accounted for another £20m. North Weald added £5m. These were not overruns on busy infrastructure. They were the price of preparing for a border regime that the government then chose not to apply in full.

The underlying policy problem was not mysterious. The EU treated the UK as a third country immediately and put checks in place at its ports. The UK delayed, reduced or dropped parts of its own regime after concluding that food entering from the EU would remain to the same standard as before Brexit. That may have eased disruption for importers and consumers, but it also turned a slice of the state’s capital spending into a scrapheap without much scraping.

Two sites remain operational: Sevington in Kent and Holyhead. The Guardian said earlier parliamentary disclosure put Sevington’s capital cost at £154m, including £30m for land and another £70m to build the main facility. HMRC also disclosed £179m of operational costs across the border infrastructure, a separate figure from the unused-site total.

The bill did not stop at central government. Portsmouth’s council-owned port spent £23m on a border control post that, according to the port’s director cited by The Guardian, now handles about two trailer checks a day against an original expectation of 80. The council received £17.1m in government funding and covered the remaining £6m itself.

Public projects fail for many reasons. This one appears to have failed the old-fashioned way: the state bought capacity before it had settled the rules that capacity was meant to serve.