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CONSOLIDATION, &c., BILLS
Ordered,
That Mr. Tony Clarke, Mr. Patrick Hall, Mr. Robert Marshall-Andrews, Mr. James Plaskitt, Mr. Laurence Robertson, Mr. Adrian Sanders, Dr. George Turner, Mr. Andrew Tyrie and Mr. Brian White be members of the Select Committee appointed to join with a Committee of the Lords as the Joint Committee on Consolidation, &c., Bills.--[Mr. Betts.]
Ordered,
That Mr. David Chaytor, Mr. Iain Coleman, Mr. Brian Cotter, Mr. John Cryer, Mr. Stephen Hesford, Mr. Edward Leigh, Mr. Ivan Lewis, Mr. David Lock, Mr. Stephen McCabe, Mr. Gordon Marsden, Mr. Piers Merchant, Mr. Denis Murphy, Mr. Peter L. Pike, Mr. William Ross, Miss Geraldine Smith, Mr. Richard Spring, Mr. Anthony Steen and Mr. Ian Stewart be members of the Deregulation Committee.--[Mr. Betts.]
29 Jul 1997 : Column 248
A1 (Dualling)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Betts.]
10.15 pm
Mr. John Home Robertson (East Lothian): The debate--[Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. Will Members leaving the Chamber do so quickly and quietly, please?
Mr. Home Robertson: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
The debate is primarily about road safety on the A1, but, before speaking about that, I must mention the tragic deaths of two young children crossing the B1348 from Seton Sands holiday centre on Saturday. That makes the point that road safety must be our overall concern in all aspects of transport planning. The accident was tragic, and there may well be a point that needs to be addressed on that spot, too.
It is extremely disappointing to have to come to the House tonight to repeat the case for dualling the remaining single carriageway sections of the A1 trunk road. The local case in East Lothian, the borders and Northumberland has been made conclusively on the fundamental grounds of safety and economic impact, and the national case for completing that missing link in the United Kingdom's strategic highway network is blindingly obvious.
I have been involved in the A1 Safelink campaign for nearly 10 years, and it was my understanding that the debate about whether to dual the A1 had been concluded in 1992, when Malcolm Rifkind and Lord James Douglas-Hamilton accepted the overwhelming weight of the argument and the unanimous pressure of public opinion on both sides of the border.
The debate had moved on to questions of funding and phasing, because the Government at that time and all other parties, both political and non-political, had accepted that the road had to be upgraded. So it is disappointing, to put it mildly, to run into unexpected problems with another Minister, this time from my own party.
The Government have announced a review of all major road schemes. Mysteriously, the Scottish Office has gone much further than both the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions and the Welsh Office, by imposing a comprehensive 12-month moratorium which has stopped the next phase of dualling between Haddington and Dunbar, which should be going out to tender now, for construction next year.
That delay is very bad news, and it will almost certainly cost lives. What on earth is there to be reviewed? The A1 has been reviewed to a standstill, with reams of surveys and reports since 1989--and it all leads to the same inevitable conclusion. We have a severely congested and extremely dangerous single-carriageway bottleneck in the national dual-carriageway network, and the only solution is a phased dualling programme to complete the link between Haddington and Morpeth.
I had a meeting with my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary on 2 July, together with a delegation from East Lothian council and the hon. Member for
Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Mr. Kirkwood). My hon. Friend told us that the review was not a Treasury-driven exercise and that it was to be a genuine reassessment of transport priorities. Fair enough--the Labour Government were elected with a specific commitment to review a number of programmes. However, we have not stopped building hospitals just because we are reviewing the private finance initiative system and we have not imposed a moratorium on water and sewerage projects while we review the Scottish water quangos--of course not. I do not understand why there should be a moratorium on the roads programme.
The other territorial transport Departments are approaching their highways reviews according to sensible pragmatic criteria. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales announced the Welsh roads review in a written reply on 3 July, he said:
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed):
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Home Robertson:
Very briefly.
Mr. Beith:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for joining me and a delegation to English Transport Ministers about the English section of the road. Does he agree that as the A1 is also an important European route, it is absurd that we have to toil to persuade Ministers even to recognise that dualling projects already in the pipeline should go ahead?
Mr. Home Robertson:
I am grateful to the right hon. Member. I was about to move on to the way in which the review is being approached south of the border.
When the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Mr. Murphy), the hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire and I met the Minister of Transport and the Minister for Roads in England last week, we were advised that the English review was split into two categories, with a comprehensive reappraisal for projects where there is any reasonable doubt, and an accelerated review, which was completed yesterday in very short order, for developments where a detailed review would be a waste of time and money.
I must put it to the Scottish Office again tonight that we could save a lot of aggravation and money, and probably several lives, too, if we were to adopt a similar accelerated review arrangement for projects such as the Haddington-Dunbar section of the A1.
At this stage, I should give a brief summary of the case for the phased completion of the Al east coast highway. From 1978 to 1983, the whole of the Scottish section of the A1 was in my constituency, and I became increasingly worried about the toll of accidents and the increasing volume of traffic on a road that still followed the line of
the ancient Great North road. There was much correspondence with the Scottish Office about specific accident black spots.
By 1988, it was painfully obvious that we needed a co-ordinated approach to the problem from both sides of the border. We are not talking just about a local road south from Edinburgh to the borders and a local road north to Berwick-upon-Tweed from Newcastle upon Tyne. We are talking about one of the two major trunk roads linking Scotland and England.
I convened a meeting of the four hon. Members concerned, the seven local authorities and a wide range of other interests, which led to a detailed technical report produced by the three local highways authorities in 1989. That report was submitted to the Scottish Office and the then Department of Transport, and, after some fairly vigorous debates, including a massive public petition and powerful backing from the Edinburgh Evening News and the Newcastle Journal, the then Government accepted the case for completing the A1 link.
The Scottish Office has made a very good start by upgrading the road between Tranent and Haddington, and by completing all the preliminary procedures for the next section to Dunbar ready for work to start next year. Indeed, the first bridge has already been built, but today it looks depressingly like a bridge to nowhere. I hope that it does not remain like that for much longer.
I put on record my personal thanks to the Scottish Office staff and, perhaps surprisingly, to LordJames Douglas-Hamilton, the former Minister with responsibility for Scottish roads, for the excellent work that has been done, and for the two small sections that are under construction further south in my constituency and that of the hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire, who I hope will be able to take part in the debate briefly. Lord James took a long time to grasp the case for the A1--that was so on other issues as well--but when he did accept the case, he certainly got on with the job in style.
Meanwhile, the volume of traffic is still increasing and the road will get even more congested as the economy improves and trade between Scotland and other parts of the European Union increases because the A1 is the main Euro-route to the east coast ports. Perhaps because of that, there is an abnormally high proportion of commercial traffic on the road.
Mr. Alasdair Morgan (Galloway and Upper Nithsdale):
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
"The review will consider afresh all schemes currently in the Welsh roads programme with the exception of the A55 dualling across Anglesey. In that case, I have decided that the strategic importance of the improvement is so great that it must proceed without delay".--[Official Report, 3 July 1997; Vol. 297, c. 218.]
I fully accept the strategic importance of traffic to and from Ireland via Holyhead, but I put it to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary that the strategic importance of traffic between Scotland and the east of England is just as great.
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