Milton Keynes City Councillor David Hopkins is calling for a serious omission from the current local plan proposal (MK2050) to be corrected. Namely, for the plan to include a site (or sites) for a Lorry Park.
The plan currently includes proposals for 310 hectares (net) additional warehousing & logistics and sees this sector as offering a critical employment opportunity for the city given the city’s transport links located as it is along the M1, A421 and A5 but which is offering up no sites to host the vast numbers of HGV vehicles when not collecting or delivering from these planned (and indeed existing) warehouses.
Cllr Hopkins comments ‘we all as city councillors and as parish and town councillors receive complaints and concerns expressed to us every day regarding HGV’s parked in residential areas, on laybys or on by-passes and slip roads, short term of all too often overnight
I lay no blame whatsoever with HGV drivers nor the logistics operating companies. The city council proposals are letting them down as much as the city council is letting down residents by not attempting to address this growing environmental and planning crisis. Drivers need and deserve a site (or sites) to park up overnight, purchase food, shower and rest or simply to hold until the site they are visiting offers them a slot to collect or deliver’.
Cllr Hopkins reflects that past MK (then Borough) council local plans made specific mention of and provision for managed lorry parking in the city, even when the number of logistics businesses was far less then we see today or which are planned for the next 20 years. In 2009 the then borough council published its Lorry Management Strategy making specific provision to address these issues. A strategy now apparently and conveniently abandoned.
For example, the relevant 2009 policy read as follow …..
Lorry Parking Facilities
8.1 Local Plan Policy
The Milton Keynes Local Plan (section 7.54 on) indicates that:
“there may be a need to provide a new lorry park in the City, particularly to reduce the
problem of lorry parking in residential areas. Other policies require the retention or
replacement of lorry park facilities in areas affected by new development proposals at Fen
Farm in the Eastern Expansion Area”
Any new lorry park facility will need to satisfy the general design policies in this plan and
also be in a suitable location to minimise its potential environmental effects.
POLICY T16 states:
• Site shall not be in the open countryside as defined in Policy S9
• The site must be well related to the Primary Distributor Road network
• Any ancillary uses are closely related to the main use of the site as a lorry park – such
as petrol filling station, refreshments, motel and vehicle repairs
• Proposals should not have a significant adverse effect on the amenity of nearby
residential areas.”
Cllr Hopkins concludes that (in his opinion) no additional planning permissions for logistic (warehouse) sites should be approved until provision for HGV parking is addressed for the benefit of local residents and the logistics industry and its drivers.
He urges people to write to MK City Council as a response to the so-called regulation 19 stage of the MK2050 local plan consultation currently underway focusing on the fact that the plan is not legally compliant and "sound" (positively prepared, justified, effective, and consistent with national policy) until it includes provision for a city based lorry park.
The consultation runs until 16 February 2026, closing at 5:30pm
