HC Deb 11 April 1961 vol 638 cc204-14

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Colonel J. H. Harrison.]

11.50 p.m.

Mr. Paul Bryan (Howden)

I am grateful for this long delayed chance to speak on behalf of my constituents about Selby Bridge. I do not pretend that my silence has left the bridge at all neglected in a parliamentary sense. When I was preparing this speech I went to the Library and asked the assistant to get me out any HANSARDS which dealt with the question of the bridge since 1945. When I went back in a couple of hours' time he had piled up on the table 36 volumes. This gives some idea of the extent to which my predecessor, Mr. George Odey, and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Barkston Ash (Sir L. Ropner), who has been the Parliamentary sentry guarding the other end of the bridge, have been looking after the interests of the people of Selby here in the House.

Tonight, I do not intend to go too deeply into the past, because the history of this affair was examined in great detail by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Barkston Ash in an Adjournment debate on 20th July. On that occasion the subject so run away with him that in the end only a minute was left to the Parliamentary Secretary to reply. So if the Parliamentary Secretary would like to use part of his time tonight to reply to what my hon. and gallant Friend said then, I should be very pleased, and I am sure that the people of Selby would appreciate it.

I see that this debate has attracted the interest of Members from well beyond the borders of Yorkshire. In fact, I see one Member who comes from one of the most far-flung fringes of our kingdom—Londonderry. The presence of these hon. Gentlemen, of course, adds weight to the argument which I shall put forward later that Selby Bridge is not a local problem only: it is a national problem.

For the benefit of these "visitors" I propose to start by explaining that the story of Selby Bridge begins in 1791, when an Act of Parliament was passed which granted the tolls of the bridge, of this very rickety old bridge, tax free to the proprietors. It is this freedom from tax which is, oddly enough, the main cause of our present quandary. Over the last sixty years the value of this rough piece of woodwork—it is almost impossible to describe what it looks like except to say that it is of what one might call Emmet design—has been boosted for two different reasons. On the one side, there has been increased traffic which has, of course, increased the value of the tolls. On the other side, the increase in the scale of taxation has increased the extent to which the provisions of the Act allow the proprietors to avoid or at least to be not liable to tax. So this bridge has become a gold mine and a curse; a curse to all Yorkshiremen and a gold mine to the proprietors.

To show to what extent the value has risen, in 1892 a delegation of men from York went to have an interview with the Highways and Bridges Committee of the East Riding County Council. Their purpose was to get rid of this great problem of the bridge. I suppose that since that date there have been a hundred such committees and delegations formed for the same purpose. On that occasion, they were told that to buy out the toll rights of the bridge would cost £3,915. In 1911, the cost had risen to £40,000. What is the worth of the bridge today? Naturally, neither the Government nor the proprietors will name a figure, because that would be likely to prejudice any future deal. But I think that some figures which I can now give will enable us to make something between a valuation and a guess.

Last year, the biggest customer, the firm paying the biggest tolls in the area, paid no less than £10,000. Another firm paid almost £3,000. The traffic over the bridge is about 5,000 vehicles a day and the toll charge is 9d. per vehicle. I work that out as an income of about £70,000 a year. Apart from the 9d. on each vehicle there is also 9d. on each ton of weight, so that a heavy lorry pays a great deal more than 9d. We must subtract the upkeep of the bridge and also take into account the fact that big customers will get a reduced tariff. Taking all this into account, one can come to the conclusion that the net income of the bridge, which is tax free, must be between £70,000 and £100,000 a year. The value of an investment bringing in a tax free return of that size cannot possibly be less than £1 million.

Over the past years hon. Members representing this area have argued in terms of local inconvenience, in terms of the infuriating prospect for their constituents of having to queue up to pay 9d. every time they go across the bridge into Selby to shop or to their daily work. Great as has been the inconvenience, it is not surprising, I suppose, that succeeding Ministers of Transport have thought that £1 million, or whatever is the figure, is a very large sum of public money to pay to get rid of a local nuisance. So, in 1938, they came to a conclusion which was to solve the problem. It was decided to build a by-pass round Selby with the idea of creating a freer flow of traffic and, also, that a proportion of traffic would be diverted from the toll bridge and thus reduce the value of the tolls and make the bridge buyable. That is the present position.

On 7th August, 1959, the Minister of Transport wrote to the clerk of the East Riding County Council: The volume of through traffic using the bridge does not justify the diversion for the immediate construction of a by-pass of trunk road funds which are more urgently required for the current major road programme. So we have the extraordinary position in which the by-pass cannot be built because the amount of traffic is too small to warrant its construction and the toll bridge cannot be bought because the traffic is too big and, therefore, the tolls too high, making the bridge too expensive to be bought.

To expunge this paradox, if that is what one does with paradoxes, I would put this key question to the Parliamentary Secretary, because it is the question on which all good judgment most surely depend: what is the natural traffic that would go across Selby Bridge? We know what the actual traffic is—as I have said, it is 5,000 vehicles per day—but that is the traffic flowing across the bridge against the strong tide of a 9d. toll. If the 9d. toll was not there, I believe that it would release such a pent-up flood of traffic that the narrow streets of Selby would be completely swamped with cars and lorries. Therefore, I believe that the prospect of taking no action except taking the tolls off is impossible for that very practical reason.

The only hope of a bridge that I can see lies in persuading the Minister that this is not just a local problem, but a national problem. I think that this can best be shown by the fact that Selby is the focal point of six main roads or, at any rate, six important routes of which four are trunk roads. Those roads are obstructed by this quite artificial obstruction of the river crossing. This artificial obstruction is the cause or partial cause of some of the most famous traffic jams in Yorkshire.

Many of the cars and lorries that crowd through the streets of York and form part of the queues in Malton and over Boothferry Bridge and the little swing bridge in Thorne should have crossed the river at Selby Bridge; but traffic avoids that bridge like the plague. One finds that a driver setting off from Hull to Leeds will go via York, and yet he should be crossing the bridge at Selby.

Hull is the third biggest port in England. Out of it comes a enormous flood of traffic, and very heavy traffic, too, and this traffic is squeezed in great congestion across the river at York and also across the Boothferry Bridge, whilst too small a proportion goes across at Selby. The roads south and west of Selby are fairly clear, whereas the roads going through York and across Boothferry are crowded.

To sum up on that, I have here a report from the surveyor to the East Riding County Council. He has been working for the council for about thirty years, and so has great experience of this area. He says that the removal of this deterrent by means of a by-pass and a free bridge would open the floodgates to traffic and, in my view, effect a more widespread redistribution of traffic than any other comparable scheme in the North of England. Let me now examine the question of what is the natural traffic crossing the bridge. I think that we can make an estimate. As a start, it is estimated—possibly the Parliamentary Secretary will agree here—that 60 per cent. of the present toll bridge traffic can be diverted—in other words, 60 per cent. of 5,000, which would mean 3,000 vehicles—would use a new by-pass bridge, presuming that there would also be a link by-passing Barlby and Riccall as wall.

In addition to that, the surveyor upon whose experience I again draw says this: I am convinced that the new traffic which would be attracted to a Selby by-pass would be in the region of 9,000 vehicles per day, which, added to the 3,000, gives a figure of 12,000 vehicles. If we are talking about a figure of 12,000 vehicles, that certainly would justify the building of a by-pass bridge, and if by chance and by magic the Parliamentary Secretary were able to announce such a decision this very night, during the period before the opening of a bridge that figure would certainly have increased to 18,000, which is just about the volume of traffic which goes down the M.1 motorway today.

The surveyor says, finally: Traffic in the foreseeable future might well be 20,000–24,000 vehicles per day, which I suggest should be the design standard for such a road. That is the argument for the case, which I should be glad if the Parliamentary Secretary would answer.

Before I sit down, I want to mention one local disagreement about which I also wish to express an opinion. The Dement Rural District Council, which is on the Howden division side of the river, is in favour of the tolls of the bridge being raised before any start is made on a bypass. The Selby Council would like the by-pass first and the raising of the tolls after. If one looks into the reasons for these attitudes, one finds that they are understandable. The Derwent Council represents people who use the bridge to go to work and suffer from the tolls, while the people of Selby would have their roads cluttered up with more traffic.

All these factors are irrelevant, however. The two things must be done together. If the tolls were raised first, the town would be flooded with traffic. The by-pass will have to be opened at practically the same time. When that happens, who will pay for the raising of the tolls on Selby Toll Bridge? At the moment, the Government would pay, because the bridge is part of the trunk road, but the by-pass would become the trunk road, and the toll bridge would become a secondary road. Would that mean that the East Riding County Council would have to pay for the raising of the tolls? That is an important point, because, however much the bypass would take away traffic from the bridge there would still be a tidy sum for the County Council to pay.

This problem has caused immense irritation in our area over the years, and for that reason there is, naturally, talk that the Government have not given enough thought to it, or, as some say, no thought at all. I am not of that school, because I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Sir R. Nugent), when he was Joint Parliamentary Secretary, made a painstaking study of the problem, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary has also taken a great interest in it. But I would like tonight an assurance from him that the Minister is aware that the building of a by-pass and the raising of the tolls would not only bring long awaited and long merited comfort to the people of Barmby and Selby, but also that it would bring real help to the lorry drivers and motorists not only all over Yorkshire, but far beyond the county.

12.9 a.m.

Colonel Sir Leonard Ropner (Barkston Ash)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Howden (Mr. Bryan) on the eloquence of his plea and also on the moderation with which he has dealt with a matter which has been a quite disgraceful record on the part of the Ministry of Transport for many years. Some months ago I occupied a great deal of time during an Adjournment debate on this matter, and will now gladly give way to my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary who will, I hope, deal with some of the points that I raised on that occasion.

12.10 a.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. John Hay)

As my hon. Friend the Member for Howden (Mr. Bryan) said, this is a matter which has exercised the House on a number of occasions in the past. This is the second Adjournment debate, as has been said, in which it has been raised within the last year. It is true that we had quite a substantial attendance in the House when my hon. Friend was speaking. We had hon. Members here from Cumberland, Norfolk, Suffolk, Ulster, and various other parts of the country, all of whom have, unfor- tunately, left the Chamber. I rather got the impression that this attendance, so widespread throughout the country, was due not perhaps so much to the national importance of Selby Toll Bridge, but because my hon. Friend was breaking, in an admirable way, a self-imposed silence of some considerable time.

I do not want to weary the House with a long recital of the history of this matter over the past thirty or forty years. My hon. Friend said that when he first decided to raise the subject on the Adjournment and asked in the Library for information about the occasions when it had been raised before no less than 36 volumes of HANSARD were provided for him. I had a somewhat similar experience. I asked the officials of my right hon. Friend's Department to provide me with the various files and documents relating to Selby Toll Bridge and bring them to the House tonight. They demurred because they said that our Department files on the subject would fill a large van and that Treasury approval for the expenditure of hiring such a vehicle to bring the documents here might not easily be obtained.

I think that it might be helpful if I recapitulate as briefly as I can the basic facts about Selby Toll Bridge, because, in essence, this is a simple matter. As my hon. Friend said, the bridge carries the East-West trunk road A.63, and the North-South trunk road A.19 over the River Ouse. It also forms the only link between the two parts of the town of Selby, so it is natural that the levying of tolls is a matter of great local interest.

The bridge is a swing bridge, made of wood. It was built in 1792 under powers given by Parliament in the Selby Bridge Act of 1791, and it is at present owned by a company of proprietors. For some reason the Act of 1791 exempts the toll revenues from tax. I cannot comment on the point which my hon. Friend raised on the subject of tax, because this is not one for me or for my right hon. Friend, but should be raised with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if at all.

Before the war, in 1936 to be precise, the East-West road A.63 became a trunk road. A public inquiry was held in 1937 and following that a route for an East-West by-pass running south of Selby was established by an Order made in 1938, which is still effective. In 1946, the North-South route A.19 and A.1041 also became a trunk road and it became necessary to consider a complementary North-South by-pass of Selby and the neighbouring townships of Riccall and Barlby. So far, no Order has been made to establish this North-South route. That was the pre-war situation.

After the war, economic restrictions made it impossible to contemplate constructing a by-pass for some considerable time, so the Ministry of Transport examined the possibility of acquiring the existing bridge and the toll rights in it and thereafter to construct a new bridge on approximately the same site.

I am advised that at that time there seemed to be some reasonable prospect that this could be done at something like a reasonable cost when economic conditions became easier, and in 1955 my right hon. Friend who is now Minister of Pensions and National Insurance included the construction of a new bridge at Selby in his programme of major trunk road schemes, but—and I must emphasise this—he laid down a very important proviso that this was subject to a satisfactory settlement being reached on the question of tolls.

I must make it clear at this point that successive Ministers of Transport have felt that it would be quite wrong to devote to the buying out of private toll rights large sums which could be better used for urgently needed improvements on trunk roads elsewhere. Road-works in this country cost a very large sum of money.

They are intrinsically very expensive. The amount of money we have for the road programme, although large by any standards, is something we must watch and guard very carefully and I am afraid that decision taken by successive Ministers of Transport cannot be departed from. It is something which, in some ways, I personally regret because, like my hon. Friend the Member for Howden and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Barkston Ash (Sir L. Ropner), I have a toll bridge in part of my constituency and I would dearly like to see the toll on that bridge abolished. I often find myself in some embarrassment with my constituents as a result of the position which I now hold.

Negotiations to work out the amount of money to be paid for the acquisition of the tolls continued with the owners of the bridge until January, 1959. It was then announced by my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Sir R. Nugent), that the negotiations had shown that the probable cost of acquiring the tolls would greatly exceed the amount which the Government felt the scheme for rebuilding the existing bridge would justify. Accordingly, he said that we were not prepared to proceed with that proposal. He went on to explain, however, that we intended to include the scheme for a by-pass as a long-term project in its due place in its order of priorities in the road programme, but that he was unable to say exactly when that would be.

That, in January, 1959, was the moment of decision. Up to that time it had been on the cards that the tolls might be acquired and the bridge freed. From that moment, however, it was made clear that the cost of acquisition would be so great that it would be quite out of proportion to the importance of the project as a whole and that a much better solution long-term would be the provision of the by-pass. As I have said, the announcement was then made that we had abandoned the idea of acquiring the tolls and rebuilding the bridge on its existing site in favour of establishing the by-pass as and when money was available in the proper order of priorities to build it.

I am sorry, but that is still the position. The cost of a satisfactory by-pass to cater for the North-South as well as East-West traffic is likely to be about £2 million, but the volume of long-distance trunk road traffic, as distinct from local traffic, passing over the bridge is not sufficient to justify us in diverting immediately from our not unlimited funds such a large sum for this scheme for it is, of course, the trunk road traffic with which we are concerned as this is a toll bridge on a trunk road. It serves, it is true, a great deal of local traffic, but the total volume of trunk road through traffic is comparatively small.

My hon. Friend the Member for Howden asked what would be the natural amount of traffic which would use Selby Bridge if it were free of toll and which, at the moment, does not use it. That really is a question of what might be the increased traffic volume which would justify a high priority for a by-pass. We took a traffic census last October of the East-West traffic. Similar figures for the North-South traffic are not available. In any event, the reconstruction of A.1 and the building of the London-Yorkshire motorway, which are both going ahead, would cast some doubt on the validity of any figures we might have obtained last October of the North-South traffic.

Dealing with the East-West traffic we discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that only 760 vehicles a day which could have gone through Selby passed through Rawcliffe and over Boothferry Bridge, which is the alternative toll-free crossing. I think that my hon. Friend would agree that those figures are hardly a sufficient volume of traffic East-West to give the by-pass a very much higher place in the queue of meritorious schemes we have for the country.

At present, we are considering the results of the traffic census in connection with the possibility of using the abandoned Barnsley-Hull railway line as a trunk road. The surveyors of the East and West Riding County Councils are preparing a report for us on this. One of the factors which we have very much in mind is the possible effects of such a project on the design and programming of the Selby by-pass, but I cannot say much about that tonight except to mention it. I would only add that we shall be announcing our decision on this matter very shortly.

Finally, I should like to repeat that we have very much in mind the hindrance to traffic and particularly to the trunk road traffic of the Selby Toll Bridge. We shall include the by-pass in our programme in its due place in the order of national priorities.

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock on Tuesday evening and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at twenty-one minutes past Twelve o'clock.