Levelling Up Fund: good news for Kent

This morning the Department of Levelling Up, Homes and Communities (DLUHC) announced awards under round 2 of the Levelling Up Fund - and it was good news for Kent.

As a County Council, KCC was able to submit one bid – and this proved to be very successful. The Dover Access Improvements scheme secured £45 million in funding. This is designed to improve the flow of traffic through the port of Dover, addressing at least part of the problems that have dogged the county for years and currently seem whenever Operation Brock has to be triggered.

The scheme involves extensive reconfiguration and investment in the port of Dover site. In particular, there will be changes to the order of the various border and customs controls, which are currently set on the basis of arrangements of two decades ago and can be much improved.

There will also be an increase in the buffer zone, removing a lot of traffic from the roads, as well as a doubling in the number of border control posts and a new dock exit route. The latter will help particularly with vehicles that have to be turned away, for example because the paperwork has not been completed.

As I have emphasised in a number of interviews today, this is not a silver bullet; there are a number of measures that need to be taken to ensure that our borders operate effectively, and the damage done to communities and businesses in Dover, East Kent and the county as a whole is ended. It is nonetheless a major step forward. There are still some further parts of approval process to be gone through with government, and the scheme will then take a number of years to implement, not least because it will have to be phased while the port and the border systems continue to operate.

Four other schemes across Kent, put forward by District and Borough councils, were successful: in Dover (so doubly good news for the town and district), in Canterbury, in Swale and in Folkestone and Hythe. All told, this represents £123 million in government investment in Kent. 

Although some have criticised awards to sites in London and the Southeast, DLUHC Secretary Michael Gove points out that proportionately more of the fund still goes to areas such as the North West; and, in an interview on the Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, he cited Kent, and the Kent coast in particular, as an example of an area in the Southeast with significant social and economic needs. We agree; in KCC‘s strategic statement, Framing Kent’s Future, our first priority was Levelling Up Kent. Today marks a good start.

You can find the KCC media release about the funding award here.