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A419 and A417

A section of my speech will enhance what my hon. Friend said about this being the bottleneck to the south-west region, and he will hear how I make that case. This section of the A4l7 has a poor safety record and suffers from severe congestion. Traffic volumes are approximately 28,000 to 31,000 vehicles a day, of which approximately 12 to 14 per cent. are heavy goods vehicles. It is not true to say that nothing has been done about the road. Three small local improvement schemes have been completed recently to improve safety at the Golden Hart public house, the Air Balloon roundabout and Birdlip junction. A number of additional small improvements are planned in the next few years. However, it must be recognised that a longer-term solution is required. I know from both personal experience and my constituency mailbag that queues occur regularly at peak periods. Traffic on the steep hills at Nettleton and Crickley, which are partly in the Forest of Dean constituency, is slow moving, and heavy goods vehicles compound the queuing problems, particularly in inclement weather when HGVs break down on the hill, causing severe congestion. In some places the road standard is generally quite poor, with tight bends and narrow lanes. Vehicle shunts occur regularly at the Air Balloon roundabout and there are accident clusters at Nettleton Bottom, Birdlip, the Air Balloon roundabout and on Crickley hill. One HGV ploughed into the end wall of a rather nice pub, the Golden Hart at Nettleton Bottom. It demolished the wall and killed the driver. That is the sort of thing that occurs. I contend that this is a nationally important scheme. Other road projects throughout the south-west—I am coming to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean—have gained priority over the A417 and A419, but the great majority of those under construction are deeply embedded in the south-west region: for example, the A30 at Merrymeet in Devon, the A30 Bodmin to Indian Queens dual carriageway in Cornwall, the Chiverton roundabout in Cornwall, major road resurfacing works on the A38 at Peartree in Devon or Cartuther to Liskeard in Cornwall. The list continues. Those are deeply embedded schemes in the south-west and while I am sure they all have tremendous merit, the crucial point is that Gloucestershire and the A417 act as the gateway to the south-west. However, the Minister, the Department, the south-west regional bodies and the Highways Agency must consider how crucial are major projects at the very bottleneck of the region. If the bottleneck is not clear, however much infrastructure regeneration there is further down the line, there will always be constraint at the top of the bottle. The road has an environmental impact. For example, the standard of living is affected by traffic congestion, daily queues and road closures as a result of accidents. A particular problem in our area is that rat-running is common through Cotswold villages and communities and includes heavy goods vehicles on small, single-track roads. When there is an accident or road closure, massive, 44-tonne HGVs are routed along single-track roads through little Cotswold villages, and a serious accident is waiting to happen if that continues.