What a locked gate actually buys you

Nine in ten drivers who rated a site's vehicle security as good said they were able to rest properly. Where security was rated poor, fewer than four in ten did.

That is not a marginal difference. It is the difference between a driver who sleeps and a driver who lies in a cab listening.

The figures are from Transport Focus, the independent transport watchdog, in the year two summary of its Lorry Drivers' Facilities Survey, published on 10 December 2025 and drawing on more than 13,000 HGV drivers across the survey's first two years. A third year has since been surveyed; the numbers here are the most recent Transport Focus has published on its own site.

Parking and resting are not the same thing

A driver who pulls onto a yard they do not trust is still legally on a rest period. The tachograph says resting. The driver is awake.

Louise Collins of Transport Focus put the finding plainly: these results clearly show the link between feeling safe and secure and being able to rest properly.

For a landowner that is worth translating out of welfare language and into business language. A driver who sleeps on your yard comes back to your yard. A driver who does not sleep leaves at four in the morning and finds somewhere else next week, and never tells you why.

The spread between sites is the whole opportunity

The same survey found vehicle security satisfaction ranging from 25 per cent to 99 per cent across sites on the network.

Read that again. Some places score almost perfectly on the thing drivers care most about. Others score one in four. These are not different industries with different budgets. They are mostly the same industry making different decisions about a gate.

That spread is where a small yard can compete. You will not out-spend a motorway services operator on fuel, food or showers. You can absolutely beat a quarter of the network on whether a lorry is safe overnight, and that is the thing the survey says actually determines rest.

What good looks like, cheapest first

A gate that is locked. Not a gate. A locked one. Most of the benefit of a secure yard is thrown away by whoever props it open because they are leaving early.

A light that comes on. Being seen is most of security. A lit yard is a yard somebody would have to walk across in view of a window.

A fence with no gap in it. The gap is always known about. It has usually been there for years.

A camera that records, and that somebody actually looks at. A dead dome on a bracket fools nobody who does this for a living, and drivers can tell at a glance.

Somebody who would notice. A yard attached to a house, a farm or a working business has a form of security no camera provides, which is a person who knows what belongs there.

None of that is a capital project. Most of it is a weekend and a few hundred pounds, and all of it is visible from the cab in the first thirty seconds, which is when the driver decides.

Just under two thirds are not happy, and that is your market

The same report found just under two thirds of drivers dissatisfied with the number and quality of lorry parking sites in the UK, slightly worse than the year before.

That is not an abstraction about national infrastructure. It is two in three of the people who might pay to park on your land telling a government watchdog that what is currently on offer is not good enough.

The shortage gets talked about as a problem for drivers and for government. It is also, straightforwardly, an opening for anybody with hardstanding and a gate.

Write down what you actually have

This is the part most listings get wrong. Everybody writes "secure yard". The phrase has been worn smooth and drivers no longer read it.

Write what is there instead. Fenced on all four sides. Gate locked from six at night. Two floodlights over the parking area. Four cameras, recorded, checked weekly. House overlooking the yard. Hard standing, not grass.

A driver choosing between two yards at ten at night is choosing on exactly this, and vagueness reads as having nothing to say. Specific beats impressive every time, because specific can be checked when they arrive and impressive cannot.

The honest version

Security spend usually gets justified as theft prevention, which makes it feel like insurance against something that might not happen.

The survey reframes it. Security is what decides whether somebody can sleep on your land. Sleep is what they are actually buying from you. Everything else, the surface, the access hours and the price, matters less than whether they close their eyes.

If you have a yard with room on it, the Parking wanted board shows who is looking near you right now, and you can answer an ad without setting anything up first. Free to use for your first 12 months at HGV-Parking.co.uk.