Levelling-up cash meant to revive hard-up towns will be used to clear up the Tories’ Brexit mess at a key Channel port.
The Government is pumping £45million of taxpayers’ money into boosting border posts and capacity at Dover in Kent.
The port was hit by chronic delays over the Easter weekend as tens of thousands of holidaymakers and school pupils were stuck in queues while their documents were checked.
Coaches full of children were at a standstill for 12 hours.
Now, the Mirror can reveal ministers are using funds from the Conservatives’ flagship levelling-up pot to increase capacity at the dock.
Answering a written parliamentary question, Transport Minister Richard Holden said: “In 2020, Port of Dover applied for £34m from the Port Infrastructure Fund, but were outside the scope of the scheme.
“Kent County Council has been provisionally awarded £45m from the Levelling-Up Fund to support additional border control booths, extra capacity in buffer zones and resequencing the order of controls at Port of Dover.
“The Government is in regular contact with the Port of Dover on border pressures and infrastructure.”
Dover has been held by the Tories since 2010 and current MP Natalie Elphicke has a 12,278 majority.
Queues formed as officials had to check all passports of people leaving the UK - a consequence of leaving the EU.
Shadow Immigration Minister Stephen Kinnock, who uncovered the use of the cash, said: "We've all seen the chaos of huge queues at Dover because of the abject failure of the Government to address the additional bureaucracy caused by their botched Brexit deal, and the problem clearly needs to be fixed.
"But it is telling that the Tories are now scrabbling around and have resorted to short-changing local communities by taking money that was supposed to be spent on boosting local jobs and high streets, in a desperate attempt to fix our broken borders."
The Port of Dover declared a critical incident last Friday when long queues of vehicles trying to board ferries built up.
Port bosses admitted it was a “horrible situation” for many travellers, with the elderly and children among passengers stuck on coaches for hours.
Downing Street was later forced to admit that "new processes" brought in after Brexit played a role in days of travel queues at Dover.
Rishi Sunak has previously been blasted for the Tories’ use of levelling-up cash.
During his first Tory leadership campaign to become Prime Minister, Mr Sunak boasted to Conservative members in wealthy Tunbridge Wells, Kent, how as Chancellor he moved money from hard-up communities to areas like theirs.
“I managed to start changing the funding formulas, to make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserve because we inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone,” he claimed.
“I started the work of undoing that.”
Naomi Smith, chief executive of internationalist campaign group Best for Britain, which hosts a Trade Unlocked conference in Birmingham next month, said: “This is the perfect distillation of Brexit - instead of opportunities and levelling-up, Kent is getting lost investment and additional checks.
“Brexit has cost us all far too much. It’s far past time for those in charge to begin addressing the economic elephant in the room.”
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