Plans for a 70-acre lorry park to solve the Operation Stack tailbacks have been met with a luke warm reaction.

At a meeting last night, Ashford Borough Council leader Paul Clokie (Con) called for an alternative to the “concrete mess” of building a 70-acre lorry park over green fields near Aldington.

He said the best solution to Operation Stack would be to extend the Quick Moveable Barrier system (QMB) to include the stretch of motorway between junctions 8 and 9 of the M20.

This would allow for lorries to be “stacked” in three lanes of the coastbound carriageway, he said, while a barrier would be placed down the middle of the London-bound carriageway so traffic could travel in both directions on that side of the road when Stack was implemented.

Changes are being made to allow the QMB to be used between junctions 11 and 12, but the much longer stretch of motorway between junctions 8 and 9 would allow 39 hours worth of arriving lorries to be “stacked”, according to Cllr Clokie’s calculations.

That is based on the knowledge that the number of lorries arriving each hour takes up a mile of carriageway when trucks are stacked bumper to bumper, and the fact that there are three lanes available in the 13 mile stretch of road between junctions 8 and 9.

Cllr Clokie proposed a solution to the problem of a lack of overnight lorry parking to combat the problem of trucks parking in lay-bys and at Orbital Business Park. He suggested GSE, the company which operates the existing truck stop near junction 10, be given £2million of funding to pay for an extension so they could accommodate more trucks.