Stuck with a 42-tonner in a heat wave, standing on the lorry park at Moto M6 Lancaster services, I emailed this stroppy Lanky message to my opposite number in Dungannon.
They’ve gone and stuck th’Irish border reet in t’middle o’ Lankyshire.
We had to wait for a barcode
Our lorry was loaded with last-minute cargo from Stockport to Northern Ireland.
It was a baking hot day, but we could go no further.
Half a dozen heavy goods drivers, including our man, were waiting for an image to appear on the screen of their smartphones.
That vital image includes a barcode of hidden data and a number, known since Brexit, as the Goods Movement Reference (GMR).
Without a GMR no lorry driver can turn into the Irish Sea ferryport area at Heysham, not even to set down an empty trailer.
The computer message warns that:
…this applies even for empty vehicles making a crossing. Each GMR contains details for a single crossing and can be used only once.
Since Brexit, we lost control
Since Brexit, British governments have handed over control of lorry traffic between Lancashire and the British ports of Belfast and Warrenpoint to computers run by ferry companies based in Luxembourg and Sweden.
For at least 60 years, transport firms in Greater Manchester and Lancashire have been able to load multiple consignments on trailers in the afternoon and catch a night sailing to Northern Ireland from a Lancashire ferryport. Now the Brexit time lag leaves cargo standing at Lancaster Services while office workers transfer details to ferry computers.
When the 3-mile Heysham to M6 link road opened on October 31, 2016, just four months after the shock of the UK EU referendum, Moto Lancaster Northbound became the last transport café before the ferryport.
Lancashire County Council contributed £29mn of the £140mn it took to build the A683 and organised a 9,000-vote public poll to name it The Bay Gateway.
The last chance saloon
For three hours on weekday evenings the lorry park that is still known as Forton Services becomes the last chance saloon for drivers heading for the 21:30 night sailing to Warrenpoint, a service operated entirely in British waters by the Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Navigation, founded in Antwerp in 1928 and now based in Luxembourg.
The other service to Belfast is operated by Stena AB of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The situation at Heysham in January 2026 was described by Derry Bros Shipping and Customs of Co. Armagh as: “severe and ongoing congestion which has now reached critical levels.”
Last minute diversions into the narrow streets of Heysham, population 6,500, often turned out worse than waiting for a GMR at Moto Lancaster.
Johnson’s Brexit and Sunak’s Windsor Framework
Lizzi Collinge, the Morecambe and Lunesdale Labour MP, said some of her Heysham constituents have been “trapped in their streets” by lorry drivers lacking a GMR number for computer systems made inevitable when Boris Johnson signed his 11th-hour EU–UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement on December 30, 2020.
When Rishi Sunak and EC President Ursula von der Leyen, agreed on a modified Windsor Framework in February 2023, the British prime minister said they had turned Northern Ireland into “the world’s most exciting economic zone.”
But three years later Lizzi Collinge MP told BBC Radio Lancashire that the situation in Heysham was “an absolute nightmare”.
“I’ve had HGV lorry drivers get in touch because they haven’t been able to get on the ships. A solution is going to have to be found and I’m not going to stop until it is.”
Just as Michel Barnier, leader of the European Commission Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom said on the BBC news on July 18, 2019, “Everybody will have to pay a price – EU and UK – because there is no added value to Brexit. Brexit is a negative negotiation. It is a lose-lose game for everybody.”
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