HC Deb 05 November 1969 vol 790 cc1141-50

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.[Mr. Harper.]

10.4 p.m.

Mr. Paul Bryan (Howden)

It is about a year since I first applied for this debate. The delay may prove an advantage, for I have every expectation that the Minister will be able to give the House a more helpful forecast and progress report than he would have been able to do a year ago.

May I start straight away with the approach roads to Hull which cross the county to round the Humber Estuary and take the port's cargo to various inland centres of population. This situation is well known and was most recently stated in the Humberside Feasibility Study.

Hull owes its position as the third port in Britain to its deep water and its convenient situation for trade with the European market. Its development was originally supported by an admirable network of railways. The railway age has passed, but successive Governments have failed to replace rail with trunk roads. No one knows the extent to which the development of Hull is now being throttled by the ludicrously ele- mentary road system, if system it can, in fact, be called.

Plans exist for an adequate system. My purpose tonight is to discover when plans will become roads and motorways. The feasibility study takes the complacent view that a good road system will exist by about the 1980s in time to cope with its fairly far-fetched plans for the importation of a vast new population into the area. Meanwhile, my constituents have to live in Gilberdyke and Newport and the other villages strung out along the crowded main road—the A63—from Hull to Leeds, the West Riding and the Midlands.

I invite the Minister to stand with me one day on the road in Newport when the children are crossing the road to school, as the huge articulated container lorries rush by in ever-increasing numbers. The Port of Hull is developing the container traffic. The Minister is not developing the roads to take it. I warn the Government that, unless quick action is taken, they will find themselves as shamed by the accident rate as they will be embarrassed by the economic effects on the area. A vehicle survey taken at Welton showed that in the last four years total vehicles have increased by 16 per cent. and that heavy vehicles have increased by 59 per cent. Five thousand heavy lorries per 16-hour day pass down this road—about 300 vehicles per hour.

No major roadworks can be carried out until the Minister so decides. In relation to trunk roads, the county council is therefore merely an agent. Even when, at last, the Minister decides to give the go-ahead, every project seems endlessly protracted. Work began this week on the Elloughton bypass. It should be finished by October, 1971, but it was in 1961 that the Ministry gave approval for the project. So 10 years have wearily passed by in frustrating discussions on the line to be followed, in dealing with objections, and in complying with the meticulous requirements of the Ministry regarding engineering details. This is far too long for any proposal for which the need has been obvious for at least 30 years.

Can the Minister give any assurance that this dreary process can be speeded up when approval comes through for the various urgently-awaited schemes.

May I now ask for news of individual road sores which have festered in my constituency for far too long. The notorious wooden Selby Toll Bridge, built in 1790, continues to groan under the weight of the heavy traffic on the Hull-Leeds-Liverpool trunk road, the A63. It has been a source of complaint for 60 years. Complaints are getting louder as temporary closures of the bridge become more frequent due to the increasing number of river craft which collide with and damage the bridge. I am delighted to hear that plans for a new Selby bridge and bypass are now in the preparation pool. The Minister will make headlines in the papers tomorrow if only he will give us a date for the start of this work.

Can the Minister, at the same time, give me a progress report on the M62? This is now designed to finish at Gilberdyke, but surely the traffic capacity of any main road should increase as it gets nearer to the terminal town of the road. Has the Minister any plans for the extension of the M62 into and beyond Hull? Can he also give a forecast of when we may see the motorway connected on the M62 to join the A1?

The bypass at Howden has long been a pressing necessity, but still awaits programming.

The proposed Humber bridge will not be in my constituency, but it obviously affects it. The bridge was orginally conceived by the then Minister during the Hull by-election. Now, the Humber Bridge Board has apparently been told by the Government that if it can find the money, estimated to be at least f13 million, it will be allowed to build the bridge, but that there will be no contribution from central funds. No one can understand why the Government are not prepared to treat the bridge as a trunk road project. Sir Roger Stevens, the Chairman of the Economic Planning Council whose report recommended the building of the bridge, has recently publicly said that he thought that the bridge was part of the road programme and would receive a grant. Perhaps the Minister would shed some light on this question.

Leaving the subject of the Humber and the approaches to Hull, may I now ask the Minister for news of a bypass for the great city of York? This scheme is now in the preparation pool and much of the preliminary work has already been done by the East Riding County Council but, again, no indication has been given of when work may be expected to start.

More urgently still from the point of view of my constituency is the much needed Malton bypass. The queue of cars which worms its way through Malton and Norton during the summer months finds it tail often enough as much as one or two miles down the York road. In terms of size of project, this is surely not something which will cripple the road programme. I press the Minister to take heed of the many representations that have been made by me over the last 15 years and by my right hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton) for at least twice as long.

My hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall) has asked me to raise the question of the Beverley southwest trunk road bypass. Plans were first agreed in 1962, and the Minister is still asking for alternative routes to be examined. As a non-event, this project is locally being classed as a second Selby Bridge. The Humber bridge will generate a fresh flow of traffic through Beverley, and this makes the bypass even more important. My hon. Friend has also asked me to say that though he is grateful for a number of improvements in recent years, he still looks forward to the much needed reconstruction of the main roads between Hull and Hornsea and Hull and Withernsea, which have become the only means of communication since the closure of the railways to these two towns.

From my speech, Mr. Speaker, you will conclude that people in the East Riding can be forgiven for regarding their home county as a forgotten region in respect of modern roads. I hope that the Minister now will be able to prove them wrong.

10.13 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. Bob Brown)

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Howden (Mr. Bryan) for raising the question of the time taken to prepare trunk road schemes from the first go-ahead to the start of works I need hardly say that this is a matter to which we attach the utmost importance, conscious as we are of the urgent need for the relief of congestion and the development of a modern and adequate road network, and of the very considerable benefits to the community which this entails.

The hon. Member has mentioned a number of individual schemes, some of which were approved for preparation a long while ago and others much more recently. He is understandably anxious that these schemes which are still at an early stage of preparation should be pushed ahead with all speed and should not be subject to any avoidable delays; and he evidently feels that experience on the older projects gives some cause for concern.

I will deal later in more detail with the position on the individual schemes which have been mentioned but, first, I should like to make some general remarks about the system as a whole, and about the changes that have been made in it in recent years with a view to minimising the incidence of delays, which, in the past, have certainly been a serious problem.

It hardly needs saying that there is a vast amount of work involved in the preparation of a major road scheme from initial approval to the point at which work can begin. The engineering work begins with a study of the alternative ways, often numerous, in which the provision of, for example, a road from A to B, or a bypass of C, can be achieved. Each of these alternatives will have advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost, of benefit to traffic, of effects on property and on amenity and in many other ways.

Once the alternative which appears to offer the best balance of advantage has been selected, there follows the job of detailed design, frequently involving many complex structures to carry the road over or under other roads, railways and other natural or man-made obstacles, or to provide multi-level junctions. And finally the drawing up of detailed contract documents, invitations to tender and the letting of contracts.

In parallel with this march the statutory procedures must also march. As the hon. Member well knows, every major scheme of new trunk road construction involves the three stages of fixing the line, fixing the necessary alterations to and stopping up of side roads and making a compulsory purchase order for the acquisition of the necessary land.

Each of these stages involves the advertisement of proposals which are often open to objection for statutory periods, and the proper consideration of these objections may in many instances involve the introduction of modifications to the scheme, or the holding of public inquiries and consideration of the inspectors' reports; all of which is perfectly right and proper, but it inevitably increases the time taken in preparation.

I need not go into more detail on the host of matters which may have to be dealt with, of which what I have said merely gives an outline indication. I will turn now to what we have done to improve the position.

First of all, in the matter of programming procedures. Formerly schemes were taken straight into the forward programme without any preparatory work having necessarily been done. This meant that there could be no accurate estimate of their cost or benefits or of the year in which it would really prove desirable and, more important, practicable to begin work. Programme years allocated in this way, as for the Elloughton and Malton by-passes, often proved unattainable.

We now have the two-stage procedure of inclusion first in the preparation pool to enable the alternative ways of tackling a scheme to be adequately and systematically studied, and the selected alternative to be prepared in sufficient detail for its cost and benefits to be accurately assessed, before a decision on its inclusion in the firm programme for a specific year is taken. This procedure deliberately postpones the fixing of a starting year until a later stage than hitherto. But it means that when the decision is made it is an informed one and that there is a much greater likelihood that the target will be met.

Next I turn to the statutory procedures. Here we have adopted as the rule what was formerly the exception, that there should be a degree of concurrence in the three stages I have described. We now aim generally at publishing either the proposed line and side road modifications, or the proposed side road modifications and compulsory purchase order, simultaneously, instead of handling each stage consecutively. In suitable cases we may even publish proposals for all three stages concurrently.

This procedure may substantially reduce the total time consumed by the statutory procedures and at the same time be of positive advantage to those affected, since they can appreciate more readily the total effect of our proposals.

Thirdly, there is the question of manpower and organisation. We have established, following negotiations with the County Councils Association, six road construction units to handle the preparation and supervision of major trunk road schemes including motorways, throughout England.

Each road construction unit consists of a relatively small headquarters and a number of sub-units. This organisation, manned predominantly by officials on full-time loan from the counties where the units and sub-units are situated, but working as an integral part of the Ministry, makes for greater efficiency by enabling us to concentrate scarce engineering manpower resources into large units for which a stable long term programme of work can be foreseen, and to delegate maximum engineering and administrative responsibility to those in immediate control of the work.

Finally, on the question of management, we now apply critical path techniques to all major trunk road schemes, both those handled by the road construction units and the smaller ones which continue to be dealt with under the system of preparation by local authorities—generally county councils—as our agents. Full-time project planners are employed, whose job it is to construct and monitor critical path networks for each scheme to ensure that the multifarious processes involved in its preparation are co-ordinated and progressed efficiently and that the attention of everyone is focused on the target dates for completion of his particular part of the exercise which must be achieved if work is to start on schedule.

I am, of course, not claiming that the effect of these measures is to make everything go through automatically on a predetermined time scale. I wish that I could claim this. There are large variations not only in the size and the inherent difficulties of schemes approved for preparation, but also in the number and complexity of associated problems which arise during the course of preparation, for example as a result of the statutory procedures, which cannot be accurately foreseen and must be faced as they arise. What I do say is that our machine is now much better geared to cope with all these problems in an efficient way and to achieve an eventual result which, while it may in some cases fall short of the original hopes, is nevertheless the best that can be achieved in the circumstances as they have developed.

I would now like to turn to the individual schemes which the hon. Member has mentioned. Two of them were programmed under the old procedures, Elloughton bypass and Malton bypass. Of Elloughton bypass, I am pleased to say that work has in fact now begun, as he said. It has indeed been a long time in preparation since a scheme—originally envisaged as an improvement of the existing road and subsequently as a bypass—was included in the programme not in 1961, as he said, but in 1960; much of this time was spent in the preliminary stage of investigating possible lines, and draft proposals were not published until 1967.

Both those proposals and the subsequent side road proposals led to substantial objections. But now that the job has been started I am sure that the hon. Member will not wish me to delve in detail into the timetable of preparation of this scheme when in view of the general changes in our procedures which I have described, no useful lessons are likely to be learned by doing so. Had these arrangements been in operation in 1960, I am sure we should have seen a much earlier start of works on this scheme.

The Malton bypass has had an even more chequered history. Plans for this bypass were made even before the war, but it was not until 1962 that we were able to include the scheme in our forward programme. Because of limitations of funds, we envisaged tackling the bypass in two stages, constructing the shorter section from A64 east of Norton to A169 first and the remainder later. But this plan fell foul of objections based on the unsuitability of the A169 between Old Malton and Malton to carry the extra traffic that would be temporarily thrown on to it, and in 1966 following the report of an inspector on a public inquiry into the proposed compulsory purchase order, we came to the conclusion that the plan would have to be abandoned.

A fresh start was made in 1967 when the complete bypass was included in the preparation pool; and since then we have progressed to the point at which the scheme is now being considered for a place in the firm programme I hope that a decision on that will not be long delayed.

Mr. Bryan

Would the hon. Gentleman tell us what his fondest hope is in this case? What is the earliest that we may hear a date?

Mr. Brown

We are pressed in Adjournment and other debates to give firm dates, and then later we have another Adjournment debate when we are slated for not keeping to the dates. Therefore, I am not prepared to hazard a guess on a date this evening.

Of the remaining schemes mentioned by the hon. Member, only the extension of the M62 motorway eastwards from the A1 to Gilberdyke has been under preparation for any length of time. This was included in the first preparation pool announcement in February, 1967, and, although about 20 miles of motorway is involved, we have made excellent progress, to the point at which we can foresee the publication of draft orders by the middle of next year.

The improvement of the A63 beyond the end of the proposed motorway, including the provision of dual carriageways on the Caves bypass and the bypasses of York and Selby, were announced for preparation only as recently as July of this year and it is, of course, too early to expect substantial progress to have been made. But I can assure the hon. Member that, although we cannot yet attempt to determine a year for start of works, these schemes will all be pushed ahead vigorously at all stages of preparation.

It will, I am sure, not have escaped the hon. Member's notice that both the route between Leeds and Hull and the A64 from Leeds to Scarborough, on which most of the schemes he has mentioned are situated, were included in the proposed strategic network of inter-urban routes published in the Green Paper "Roads for the Future" by my right hon. Friend's predecessor earlier this year. All these routes are intended to be built or comprehensively improved to a high standard. This indicates our agreement with the hon. Member's views as to the importance of the two routes in question.

A bypass of Howden on the A63 would be a smaller scheme than the others that have been mentioned. The county council has, in fact, been authorised, as recently as September, to prepare a scheme for such a bypass to the point at which it can be considered for inclusion in the divisional programme of schemes costing less than £¼ million. The A63 will, of course, gain very substantial relief from the construction of the M62 motorway, and the justification for a bypass of Howden in the light of forecast residual traffic flows is an aspect which will require careful consideration.

Finally, I will refer briefly to the hon. Member's remarks about the financing of the Humber Bridge. The Government envisage that this project should be financed by loan and should be tolled. We have had some discussion of the details with officials of the Humber Bridge Board and we expect to resume this discussion when the board has obtained further relevant information I cannot say more than this at present, but I will, of course, bear in mind all that the hon. Member has said.

Mr. Bryan

Will the hon. Gentleman devote the remaining three or four minutes at his disposal to the Selby Bridge, quite the biggest problem which I have raised this evening, but to which he has given no time whatever.

Mr. Brown

A promise to consider separately what could be done to improve conditions at the Selby Bridge, where the trunk road crosses that antique privately-owned toll swing bridge, was made in 1967 by my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle) when, as Minister, she announced her decision on the Humberside road network. As a result of that consideration, a scheme was included in the third preparation pool which was announced in July. A preliminary report is expected next year, and I understand that the estimated cost will be in the region of £1 million.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at half-past Ten o'clock.