HC Deb 11 July 1978 vol 953 cc1467-78

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

1.26 a.m.

Mr. Patrick Mayhew (Royal Tunbridge Wells)

The A21 is the main road that runs from London to Hastings. It runs through my constituency, from the outskirts of Tonbridge to the Sussex border at Flimwell, about 15 miles away. On either side of the village of Pembury it is not unusual for the traffic to build up to a distance of more than a mile in a traffic jam. It is here that the B2015 joins the A21 from Maidstone, carrying heavy traffic from there and from East Kent and Paddock Wood. Here the A21 passes through the middle of the village of Pembury, by a carriageway all of 18 feet wide.

I am grateful for the opportunity to draw attention to the project for a bypass round this the worst bottleneck to be found on the A21, of which the Under-Secretary of State, who has always courteously received me and listened to my representations over two or more years on the subject, is aware. I submit that a wholly unnecessary delay is being imposed on the construction of the bypass for Pembury.

I refer to the fact that 44 years after the bypass was first promised, up to two years are to be spent by the Department of Transport duplicating work that has already been done by the Kent county council in selecting the line of the road. It is work that can arrive only at the the result that everybody already knows and has known for years.

When the Minister introduced the Leitch report recently he said that it was the Department's role to ensure that the right road is built in the right place to the right standards and at the right time. As for the right road, the Depart- ment knows that Kent and East Sussex, which act as a funnel for the vast majority of the United Kingdom's road-borne trade and tourism to and from the Continent, have had far less than their fair share of funds for building roads. The Department predicts growing traffic loads for the A21. Of all the trunk roads in Kent and East Sussex the A21 is the most archaic. In May 1978 the Under-Secretary of State wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings (Mr. Warren) in these terms: We need no traffic counts to convince us that improvements are necessary. That is right. However there are those who now suspect that the Department is perhaps preserving the A21 under some conservation programme to take its place with the Berkshire Ridgway as a road of outstanding historic interest.

Moreover, it is now proposed that the area through which the A21 runs shall be made an area of outstanding natural beauty. Yet the sidelanes and back-doubles are used by traffic trying to avoid the jams at Pembury.

There cannot be any question but that if the A21 as a whole is not to be remodelled in its entirety, which we should all like but we recognise the financial constraints, the bypass around Pembury that has been promised for 44 years is the right road to proceed with at once.

The right place: never in the history of this project, if one can describe as history the story of something that never happens, has anyone concluded that a line other than the line to the south of the village of Pembury was a practical possibility. Thus, this line has been shown on the town map for Tunbridge Wells and Southborough since 1972, and that map was nine years in the making, with prodigious consultation along the way. The Kent county council, which for years has wanted to build this bypass, long ago concluded that the line for the road should be to the south, and that was the right place for it. If one is going to the south, the actual line chooses itself.

The right standards: to put a single carriageway road round Pembury would be absurd. The great problem which the A21 presents is the queueing imposed by—to use an expression from our last debate—its narrow and twisted nature. A single carriageway constructed on a curve would prevent any overtaking at all, so that, even on the bypass round Pembury, with a single-line carriageway, the slow vehicles would still prevent the faster ones from overtaking them. It is impossible to contemplate duplicating all these procedures of planning and construction to make a second carriageway later.

The right time: try telling Pembury that this is not the right time and one risks getting a declaration of UDI with all the traffic halted at the frontiers. Pembury has had more than enough of the dangers to life and limb presented by the traffic passing through its centre. It was the right time 44 years ago, and it has not stopped being the right time ever since.

It is against this background and these principles that the current procedures of the Department regarding the Pembury bypass fail to be judged. The Department is solemnly insisting on going through the same preliminary report procedure that would be appropriate if the Minister were suddenly to wake up one morning and say "Let us build a spaghetti junction over Canterbury cathedral." Who is the Department asking to prepare that report, with all its investigation of alternative layouts, estimates and technical approach reports, deposit periods, exhibition periods and assessment reports? None other than the Kent county council. As a result, the Minister is not scheduled—I have the schedule here—to adopt the preferred line until a period beginning on 14th May and ending on 6th August 1979.

Let it not be supposed that all this is necessary in order to undertake at an early stage all the public consultation that will be required: not at all. I have already mentioned that the southern line is shown on the 1972 town map for Tunbridge Wells, which itself was the subject of public consultation since 1963.

A public inquiry is still scheduled to take place when? between 27th December 1982 and 3rd January 1983—into the necessary compulsory purchase orders.

Why does not the Minister come to Pembury or to Tunbridge Wells, hold a public meeting, say that he wants to void unnecessary waste of time, explain that the southern route seems to him to be the only possible one, but that he will listen to other views then and there and invite any objectors to come to visit him in London? I can assure him of a grateful welcome if he will do that. In that way he could get on with the important part of the job.

Instead, the regional controller wrote to the Pembury parish council on 25th January this year: The Preliminary Report is an essential and integral part of the planning processes required for any major trunk road improvement scheme. It cannot be dispensed with just because, prior to the trunking of the road, the County Council had already established the basic principles and produced a draft line. Indeed, because these principles were established many years ago, changes in traffic patterns and predicted growths may have invalidated the basic principles thus, of course, possibly affecting the conclusion that the existing line is the correct one. The Preliminary Report is therefore designed to investigate the basic principles and alternative solutions and, in the light of present conditions, to produce an efficient and economic solution. The conclusion may well be that the existing line is indeed the best solution but until the conclusions are known there is no way in which Pembury Bypass can proceed further. He says that this will seemingly delay works by up to two years but before the Department commits itself to expenditure in excess of £2 million it must be satisfied that the project has been propertly investigated. What is all this about £2 million? The White Paper "Policy for Roads", published in April puts the cost at £1 million, correct to the nearest million. I do not know who is paying directly for the unnecessary work which the Kent county council is having to do. I do not know whether it is the ratepayers of Kent or the taxpayers of the United Kingdom as a whole, including those of Kent. Whoever pays, it is a waste of money and time. No one who knows the place could suppose or ever has supposed that the line can be other than to the south.

Two steps are now urgently needed. First the Minister should, perhaps after a meeting of the type that I have suggested, adopt the southern route as the preferred route, relying upon what everybody in the district has known for donkey's years. Secondly, the Minister should not muck about; he should say that this one-mile construction shall be of dual carriageway standard.

Bearing in mind that if this opportunity is lost the later construction of a dual carriageway will cost much more in delays to traffic and ultimately higher prices, the net additional cost will be slight.

At present this project is proceeding at the pace of the traffic through Pembury on a summer Saturday morning. The duplication is having a disastrous effect upon confidence in the machinery and good will of Government. It gives no encouragement at all to those of us who urge restraint and lawful behaviour in the protests of those who consider that after 44 years, enough is enough.

With last week's example of the Penistone bypass I sincerely hope, as the sitting Member, that my constituents in Pembury do not wish that they were in the middle of a by-election.

1.38 a.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr. John Horam)

I am grateful to the hon. and learned Member for Royal Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Mayhew) for raising this subject, although it was perhaps unfortunate that it followed the last debate in the House. I hope that he has an opportunity to speak to his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Dover and Deal (Mr. Rees), because if he had made a shorter speech we could have come to this important subject earlier. This is more important than the matters about which the hon. and learned Member for Dover and Deal was talking.

Perhaps I can allay some of the fears and misapprehensions that have grown up in the last few months about the apparently slow progress of this road.

No one disputes that Pembury needs a bypass. That need was emphasised by our decision to make the A21 a trunk road, all the way from its junction with the A25, near Sevenoaks, down to Hastings. Thus, the responsibility for the road passed from the Kent and East Sussex county councils to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. The transfer took place on 1st April 1977. Trunking of the road identified it as part of the national road system linking the main centres of population to each other and to the ports.

The hon. and learned Gentleman rightly referred to the role played by Kent in taking a large part of the traffic coming to the capital from abroad. Before trunking, Kent county council in its area had done a great deal to upgrade the A21 to a standard sufficient to enable it to carry the volumes of traffic attracted to it and to bypass some of the main centres of population. It was surely right to give priority to bypassing Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, because these larger communities obviously caused the biggest delays to traffic and suffered the worst ravages because of it.

Completion of the 13-mile length of the dual-carriageway bypasses of Sevenoaks and Tonbridge has done nothing to help Pembury and has perhaps made conditions somewhat worse there, because drivers heading towards Hastings will have become accustomed to a high speed on the bypasses and will perhaps be less tolerant of more difficult conditions through Pembury.

In addition, as the hon. and learned Gentleman pointed out, there is not one problem at Pembury, but two. The second arises from the B2105, which carries traffic from Paddock Wood to the east of Pembury through and on past the village centre. Therefore, Pembury does not need one, but two bypasses, the second being the responsibility of the Kent county council.

Quite fairly, the hon. and learned Gentleman pressed me about the speed with which the Department, having taken responsibility for the main bypass, is proceeding in this matter. He has put down Questions and written me numerous letters, as have many of his constituents. I am thinking particularly of the Pembury 2000 action group, which is very active. We have also had a petition from parishioners of Pembury.

Our aim, as we have said throughout, is to finish the road eight years from its entry into the preparation pool. It entered the pool in July 1977, so we are talking of completion seven years from now, in 1985. That assumes that there are no unforeseen difficulties, such as can occur, the most notorious of which are difficulties concerning public inquiries but which can include engineering difficulties.

Though the hon. and learned Gentleman may find it hard to believe, that timetable is a considerable improvement on the average length of time taken to complete a road from its entry into the preparation pool. It normally takes 10 years to encompass the complete construction of a road to the point where traffic is running upon it, and that applies to small schemes—even smaller than the Pembury bypass—as well as to mammoth projects such as the spaghetti junction scheme to which the hon. and learned Gentleman referred.

That timetable indicates the importance and priority that we attach to completing the Pembury bypass. It is beating the average, on present plants, for the time taken between conception and admission to the preparation pool and completion. We have managed to cut the period by two years, partly because a certain amount of work has been done by the Kent county council.

That leads to one of the hon. and learned Gentleman's questions. He quite fairly asked whether we were duplicating the work that has been done by the council. The same officials are now engaged on the work as were engaged upon it when the council was in charge. However, it is hardly likely that those people will be going over the same work as they did previously. That would simply not be a rational use of time, especially since county councils have been constrained in their spending and have often therefore had to restrict the number of officials doing a particular job. In those circumstances they obviously will not duplicate work, and they are not doing so.

The work done by the Kent county council was of a very preliminary nature. It boiled down to getting some idea of the line that the road should take; it was not the detailed elaboration which is necessary in order fully to present a road scheme of this kind. Kent had not in any way begun the preparation of the statutory procedures which a road must complete, whether it is the responsibility of a county council or the Department.

I should like to give the hon. and learned Gentleman an idea of the work that has been going on in the past few months and will be continuing in the next few months to show him the sort of detailed preparation which needs to go into a scheme of this kind, wherever it may be.

First, we have been preparing the detailed environmental framework for consideration of the scheme, looking at the sort of country the road goes through, with preparation of the alignment of the road, considering whether earth mounds may be necessary in certain places, considering the detailed topography of the road, and so on, in order to get a clear view of the two alternative routes and the environmental consequences of both.

That work is necessary in any case, but it is necessary also to satisfy the landscape advisory committee, which will be visiting the site this month to look at the detailed preparations and arguments which we have been putting forward. That is the first step towards getting a clear view, as Leitch says we should, of the environmental consequences of any scheme. It is an attractive area. We do not ignore that.

Mr. Mayhew

Is it not a fact that the Kent county council has been required to assess the practicality of a scheme providing for the road to go to the north of the village under the alternative layout section of the procedure? Everybody knows that that is impractical, but I understand that the county council has solemnly to sit down and assess the technical practicalities of that. Is that not so?

Mr. Horam

Indeed. The landscape advisory committee has to be satisfied that on environmental grounds—landscape grounds and aesthetic grounds—the route that we have chosen is the best. To do that it has to compare alternative routes. If at the end of the day the committee finds the northern route is the best—whatever the practicality on other grounds—it must have an opportunity to say so. Therefore, one has to satisfy those very sensible criteria—criteria which are considered to be appropriate not only by the Department but by an independent body such as the Leitch committee. We have to approach it in a sensible way, and that includes considering a northern as well as a southern route.

Second, in many cases—notorious cases such as Archway and the M3—the Department has been castigated for not having up-to-date traffic forecasts. In the Pembury case, the traffic counts justifying the road were made as long ago as 1972. Therefore, to look at the question of the right standard, to which the hon. and learned Gentleman referred—whether it should be dual-carriageway—it is necessary to look at traffic counts which are at least of the current year when one will be considering these matters at a public inquiry as long in the future as 1982. Even then they will be four years out of date if we have a public inquiry in that year. If we stuck to the 1972 figures, they would be 10 years out of date, and objectors could well feel that that was out-of-date information. We have to have the information reasonably up to date.

There have therefore been traffic counts taking place on the road to ascertain a correct view about the standard of the road, for example, quite apart from the question whether it is absolutely necessary, which I believe it to be.

Third, we must look at an economic analysis of the road, taking into account up-to-date traffic figures. To accord a road priority over other schemes, we have to rank schemes in some sort of order to determine which should go forward first, and we can do that only by some sort of cost-benefit analysis. For that purpose one has to have up-to-date information, including the traffic counts.

All this information and analysis—environment, traffic and economic—will be ready in a few months, and we can then present the information to the public. But this work had not been done by Kent county council. It is not being duplicated by the Department. This is the necessary and inevitable next step in the preparation of the scheme, and it must be done as quickly as possible.

The hon. and learned Gentleman said that everyone knew that the southern route, was best and that we should just adopt it and cut out all the public consultation. He said that the local people had known for donkey's years that the preliminary route chosen by the county council was the right proposal. But when we finally publish the route, some people will be directly affected, some of the land will be taken. Our experience is that people will then take advantage of their right to raise objections. They may have the statutory right to raise them at the public inquiry.

It will not be sufficient for the Department to say then that it has done its calculations in a "back of the envelope" way and that the Minister has confidence in the scheme if they can prove that we have not done our calculations properly. The inspector, independently appointed by the Lord Chancellor, would say, "This is not good enough. I will quash this proposal and we shall have to look at it again". That is the kind of trouble caused by being slipshod at this stage. If we want to get through the public inquiry rapidly, we must spend some time now making the necessary calculations.

Although 99.9 per cent. of Pembury people wanted the southern route, one or two objectors could decide they had a legitimate argument and put their case forcefully to the inquiry. I imagine that plenty of people in Pembury could bring excellent professional services to bear.

Mr. Mayhew

Surely the fallacy or that argument is that the inspector does not quash the proposal, as the Minister claimed. He makes a report to the Secretary of State and it is for him to decide whether the scheme should go ahead. In the circumstances that I have described he would have to say that it should.

Mr. Horam

I am not sure that one can prejudge the matter in that way. The Secretaries of State for Transport and the Environment together would have to consider the inspector's report and would have the final way. But they must pay attention to the inspector and if he finds that the case is sufficiently non-proven they must take that into account. They must rest on their final view but inquiries have been aborted in the past through difficulties of this kind. I must ask the hon. and learned Member to bear with that perhaps cautious but also sensible approach.

Let me give the hon. and learned Member a commitment. I understand the frustration when so many people want this bypass. If we find—we can ascertain this shortly now because of the work done between the middle of last year and now—that the northern route is not an alternative at all, we can short-circuit the procedure of public consultation. I am anxious to do so. I have said many times that I see no point in elaborate public consultation procedures when only one effective route is possible.

Nevertheless, under the procedures laid down by the hon. and learned Member's own party in 1973, we have to have some public consultation even if there is only one possible scheme. However, if only the southern route is viable, I shall make the consultation of the most skeletal kind. I will ask my officials to publish the fact that they have come to this conclusion and invite anyone to comment on it, but conduct no further investigation.

That could save about six months and we should then probably be talking about doing that in the early part of next year. By the end of 1979 we should have it fairly well programmed. It will then take about 18 months to two years to work it up in a detailed design stage with all the engineering consequences. The inquiry should take place in 1982, with a start in 1983 and a finish in 1985. That is rather tight, with little room for slippage, but that is the sort of time we could finish in.

It would not have been done any faster by the county council. I understand from a publication by the Pembury 2000 group that the council said that it would come after the Bluebell Hill improvement south of Chatham was completed, which under Kent's current TPP will be finished in 1981–82. That means that even if the council went ahead as planned—and I doubt whether they would be able to achieve that—they could not start by 1983. With the funds available, I think that we shall be able to start this sooner than Kent could have done if it had remained a county council responsibility. At the end of the day, the people of Pembury will be getting their bypass sooner than the average time and sooner than if Kent had remained in charge, simply because the council would have lacked the financial resources—

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 four minutes to Two o'clock.