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A3 (Hindhead)

: The hon. Lady makes an important point. Portsmouth carries more than 1 million tonnes of freight per annum and is the fourth largest local economy in the south-east of England. However, of those top four economies, it is the only one without a motorway connection to London and the only one that requires the use of a single carriageway on the main trunk route to London. In fact, Hindhead has the only single carriageway on that network between Portsmouth and Scotland. In addition, Portsmouth is the only one of the four in which the main arterial route to Heathrow and Gatwick is blocked, right in the middle, by traffic lights. The Minister will appreciate the severity of the bottleneck created for my constituents. The queues to get through the traffic lights at Hindhead are utterly horrendous.