Oral answer to question provided on Friday, 25 September 2009 in the House of Commons, by Nicholas Brown (Labour), North East Regional Grand Committee.

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A1 (North)

Answer

I can say to the right hon. Gentleman that Transport Ministers certainly did understand that, because I have in front of me a press release from the Department for Transport announcing a four-stage programme to upgrade the A1 north of Newcastle and it is dated 2 March 1992. However, as the right hon. Gentleman knows even better than I do, that has not happened. It is best for us—this is what I have been trying to do—to get behind the reasons why it has not happened, and I know that the right hon. Gentleman is even more familiar with the debate than I am. The correct way forward—he hinted at it in his question—is not savage cuts and most certainly not a cancellation of all spending on road programmes, which is advocated by a political party other than mine. The best way forward is to take the regional element of the Department for Transport’s programme, set a sum aside for dualling the A1 north of Newcastle and do it incrementally, taking the accident blackspots or more difficult parts of the road network first, because we should treat that as our priority. Although we cannot prove our case on usage numbers on the road up to Berwick and then along to Scotland, there clearly is a case that we can make to the Department and it is my policy as regional Minister to ask the Department to reach us halfway and for us to offer some funding to try to secure part-funding from the mainstream departmental budget and to have a programme of incremental works that will eventually get us to the objective that I think is the right one and that the right hon. Gentleman supports, which is to get the road dualled all the way up. A programme that eventually gets us there over time is better than an ideological dispute about whether the Department will pay for it all and then the Department saying, as it has done for the past two decades, that it will not pay for any of it, which is the position that we are in at the moment.

This is an answer to the Oral question asked on Friday, 25 September 2009 by Lord Beith (Liberal Democrat).

Question

Do Transport Ministers in England and Scotland understand both the national strategic significance of the A1 and its significance to the development of our region and of eastern Scotland? If they do recognise that, why is it not recognised in a strategy for the road that will complete the dualling process, rather than one that has seen the dropping of two important phases of the dualling—that between Morpeth and Felton, and the particularly dangerous section of the road near Belford—both of which had been worked up by the Highways Agency?

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Secondary information

Type

Oral answer to question

Reference

NERGC c9-10 

Session

2008-09

Chamber / Committee

House of Commons Grand Committees

Subjects

Scotland North East A1

Link

View this Oral answer to question on www.publications.parliament.uk