Trunk Roads (Selby) (Hansard, 23 July 1987)

§ Mr. Michael Alison (Selby)

May I start by saying that I enjoy double good fortune in this debate — first, by having secured this slot so near to the end of our summer sitting and, secondly, that the Minister designated to reply is my hon. Friend the Minister for Roads and Traffic. He is a most conscientious and assiduous member of the Department of Transport team. I am especially grateful to my hon. Friend for having taken the trouble, in the past fortnight, to travel incognito over some of the roads that are the subject of this debate.

This evening my remarks will largely concentrate on the need for an early start to the Selby bypass. My hon. Friend the Minister may think that I am wasting his time and that of the House by pushing on a door that is already open as the Selby bypass is provided for, because it features explicitly in the recent White Paper "Policy for Roads". I must remind my hon. Friend that a Selby bypass was planned and projected as long ago as 1938 — I have official correspondence to prove that — yet it never materialised. Later that bypass was described as "programmed or in preparation" in the Department of Transport report entitled "Roads in England" published in March 1969. That was nearly 20 years ago.

It maintained that status until the 1975 White Paper, when it was described as being in "the preparation pool." That proved to be a drowning pool. Later still, the 1978 White Paper stated that construction of the Selby bypass would start in the period 1981 to 1983. Where is it today? It is still a paper project in the 1987 White Paper, nearly 50 years after it was first mooted.

The Minister will understand the need for me to bring this matter to the attention of the House and to press him to make a clear and unequivocal declaration of intent. Will he now say categorically that the Selby bypass will not slip back, as it has so often in the past, but will be started at the latest in the period designated for it in the 1987 White Paper?

I wish to press the Minister further. In a letter dated 20 January 1987, one of the Department of Transport's regional officers wrote to the county surveyor of North Yorkshire county council stating explicitly that the constraints controlling the 1991 start date for the Selby bypass were not lack of finance but delays occasioned by the usual statutory procedures relating to the line of the road, land acquisition and so on. The Minister should spare no effort to accelerate these procedures and thus secure an earlier start date. If he does not do that, a 1991 start date will mean our having to wait at least until 1994 before Selby can hope to see any benefit from a bypass. That is six and a half years away.

One means by which vital time could be saved, and at a stroke, would be by the Minister agreeing to the use of the concurrent rather than the consecutive procedure concerning the publication of the line, side road and compulsory purchase orders involved. In pleading for this telescoped procedure, I have the total backing of the North Yorkshire county council—the strategic planning authority for the area and the Minister's local agents—the similar backing of Selby district council, the local planning authority, and the overwhelming backing of the 603 local people involved. A vast amount of discussion, consultation and agreement have occurred and reached completion. The time is now ripe for action.

I hope that the Minister will agree to the telescoped procedure I have proposed. I hope that he will also undertake to bleed, so to speak, the bureaucratic procedures of his Department of the customary float times that are often included to cater for unforeseen eventualities —the double checking of his agents' works and so on. My aim—I hope I can engage the Minister's committed aspiration to the same aim—is to secure that the Selby bypass scheme is moved into the 1987 White Paper's list of schemes, with a planned start of construction not later than March 1989.

I will now flesh out the rather narrow and skeletal arguments of procedures and programming that I have been using, with a reminder of the real human dimension that lies behind them. Conditions in the town centre of Selby for pedestrians and road users alike are atrocious. Three trunk roads—the A63, the A 19 and the A 1041 — intersect in the town and two of them are funnelled through the notorious Selby toll bridge.

On the Abbey side of the toll bridge the trunk road is so narrow that two big wagons moving in opposite directions are liable to decapitate pedestrians—mothers with prams, for example — with their wing mirrors overhanging the narrow pavements. That accidents do not happen more regularly is due almost certainly to the fact that such wagons are more often stationary than moving, or moving at a snail's pace, thanks to the delays occasioned by toll collection on the bridge.

This is not meant to be an argument in favour of the toll bridge delays. On the contraty; the existence of this wooden 18th century swing toll bridge astride a major national trunk road must be one of the most bizarre and unacceptable anomalies in the whole network of such roads for which the Minister is responsible. The delays, dangers and costs occasioned to Selby and its locality, indeed to the whole nation, are intolerable.

I mention just two drawbacks. First, unique additional costs are imposed on local industry. Selby is potentially a commercial growth point, given that the district embraces the largest and most modern coalfield in Europe and three of Britain's largest fossil fuel electricity generating plants. But the Selby toll bridge has turned the district into a locality not to be cultivated but to be avoided. In a recent approach by the Selby district council to the 22 companies located in the area, inquiring about financial losses occasioned by the toll bridge, some extraordinary responses were received. One company said that the cost to its customers and itself occasioned by toll charges and toll bridge delays amounted to £40,000 annually. Other smaller companies reported costs running into many thousands of pounds. Imagine the incentive this constraint provides in terms of extra marginal cost to a company considering a move to or an expansion in Selby. They might as well be offered the plague as an incentive. Yet, there are some 3,000 unemployed in the Selby district.

Secondly, I should mention the safety hazard. British Coal in particular is actively concerned about the delays that the toll bridge might occasion to mine rescue vehicles having to travel fast in an emergency. It would be no use suspending the tolls temporarily in such a situation. It is the persistent existence of immense stationary tailbacks of jammed vehicles for miles on either side of the bridge that is the real hazard, not only for mine rescue vehicles but for 604 fire engines and ambulances as well. All those facts are additional to the usual cost benefit analysis that underpins my hon. Friend's priority rating for bypasses and add weight to my plea that every nerve should be strained and every ingenuity deployed to secure a start for the Selby bypass during the year 1989.

Finally, I hope that my hon. Friend will register one or two slightly wider factors. Developments on or connected with other roads locally will affect the life of the Selby disrict in the next few years. Improvements already taking place or completed on adjacent sections of the A19 trunk road at Riccall and Barlby and, further afield, at York — the outer ring road — and Eggborough will tend to attract even more traffic to Salby. A nightmare is threatening the nearby town of Sherburn-in-Elmet, which I believe my hon. Friend may have travelled through. There, the British Gypsum company has suffered a flooding setback to its on-site quarry, and it is having to bring in 7,700 tons of gypsum per week by road—350 lorry loads a day—from its Newark quarry. That makes a Sherburn and South Milford bypass the Selby district's highest priority after the Selby bypass. The Sherburn bypass is a county responsibility and project. However, transport supplementary grant from my hon. Friend's Department is a crucial factor, and I hope that he will take note of the Sherburn problem.

Traffic in Yorkshire has been growing faster than the national average—45.4 per cent. between 1970 and 1985 compared with 41.4 per cent. for Great Britain as a whole. My hon. Friend should have Yorkshire — the premier county—written on his heart, with an arrow through it marked Selby. His name will then be written with gratitude on the hearts of the tens of thousands of my constituents on whose behalf I speak in this debate.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr. Peter Bottomley)

I cannot think of anyone whom I would prefer to engage the attention of the Government in a necessary bypass for his constituency than my right hon. Friend the Member for Selby (M r. Alison). I had the privilege of following him at the Department of Employment, although he was of a higher rank than I, and I have admired, as hon. Members on both sides of the House have, the work that he has done as Parliamentary Private Secretary to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in the past four years. Together with the needs of Selby, the heart of his constituency, this makes me almost rejoice in the opportunity to spell out some of the relevant information on the timing of the Seby bypass, and to make some rather more general points about the road and bypass programmes.

The House will want to join me in paying tribute to the service that has been given by my right hon. Friend. Selby is well known, partly because of the change in the name of the constituency on the occasion of the last boundary changes, partly because of the great abbey there, and partly because of the growing development of the fossil fuel power stations, and the general growth in the area. My right hon. Friend said that my name might be remembered when the bypass is opened, but it is his name that will be remembered for the persistent way, both in public and n private, in which he has pursued the case for Selby.

My recent visit to Yorkshire for other purposes gave me the opportunity to go through Selby. I have with me the receipt for the 7p toll that I paid. It did not increase public 605 expenditure, because I paid for it out of my own pocket, and was happy to do so. I look forward to the time when those who want to visit Selby and need to go there can do so without delays, and those who want to go past it can, without inflicting their vehicles and their presence on the people of the town.

The difficulty comes not solely because of the existence of the historic swing toll bridge but because Selby needs a bypass. That was clear not only from the time of the Armitage report on heavy lorries, but also, as my right hon. Friend has said, in 1938. The difficulties in the middle and late 1970s came in large part from a shortage of cash. The 1975 roads White Paper was almost the signal for the invitation to the International Monetary Fund to help the then Government run the economy, and the programme became delayed, as the amount of Government money for national roads was cut in half between 1974 and 1979. That was not the sole factor but a contributing factor.

In 1984, a public consultation document said that the reasons for the bypass were the shared use of the town centre by the community of Selby and through traffic which, together with the operation of the tolled swing bridge, caused problems that could not be solved using the existing roads. The Department asked for the views of local people on where to put this new road and where to put the traffic. The two suggestions were not decided on by local people with unanimity, or even a great deal of pleasure. There was the northern route, which was too short, and the southern route, which had the effect of separating one part of the community from the other.

The Department went away and did some work, and I was delighted to be able to announce a year ago the line of this route. It was difficult to put that forward with confidence, because the economics of roads vary with the length and the amount of time that traffic is able to save, together with an estimate in the value of the drop in traffic casualties. It is always a bit heartless to put a value on the savings or the loss of human life and the injuries concerned, but we need to have some yardstick, and that is the best that we can have.

Having put forward that line, I believe that a great deal of work needs to be done. We need to examine the soil and carry out a topographical survey. We also need to study the origin and destination of traffic because that becomes important not only for planning the precise route of the road and the junctions, but to give the Department of Transport a good case at any subsequent public inquiry.

We then move on to the design and preparation of orders. My right hon. Friend referred to using concurrent or consecutive procedures. He will know that the Department is keen to save time whenever possible. It is not difficult to go for concurrent procedures when we have a small non-controversial scheme. Such schemes will still have objectors because there are always people whose garden, farm or land is affected by the proposal. There are times when it is sensible, because it will save time, to choose the concurrent procedures. Unfortunately, this is not one of those cases.

There are two reasons why it would not be right to use concurrent procedures in this case, although I fully accept and understand the reason why they have been proposed. First, to use concurrent procedures would mean that it would take longer for the orders to be produced because more work would have to be done. Secondly, for a road 606 that it likely to be six miles long, there would certainly be an inquiry. I should formally be advised to say that there might be one, but everyone in the House knows that there certainly would be an inquiry. If the independent, impartial inspector recommended a modification, that would destroy all that work that had been done. We would not have to go back to scratch in planning the road, but we would have to do so in drawing up the orders. So it is wise for us, and likely to save time in the end, to go for consecutive orders.

I hope that the description of the work that is already in hand will demonstrate to the residents of Selby and people living further away who at present have to go through Selby that this is by no means a paper project. It is a larger bypass than was proposed in 1984 and it will require more work. There is no need for me to go in great detail through what happens afterwards. I shall summarise by saying that when we have done our further work we shall explain what we are proposing. People will have the the chance to object, and then we enter the inquiry process.

We can never be precise about how long it will take to get through those necessary processes and statutory procedures. I emphasise that there is a democratic element, that people who are adversely affected can object to Department of Transport proposals. Normally that leads to a public inquiry where their views can be heard by someone who is independent of the Department. We take the inspectors' recommendations seriously. We do not invariably accept them, but normally we try to because that is the way to take some of the controversy out of road schemes. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right in saying that there is near unanimity on the need for a bypass, but I suspect that when it is put forward people may feel that they want to protect their own interest by raising objections.

I refer to the general problems of planning road schemes. It normally takes about 13 years from the proposal for a road to building it. We believe that we are saving time on that. We have had the advantage of a review by an outside expert. We shall continue to apply those recommendations, plus our own experience, to cutting out necessary time in preparing road schemes, including the Selby by pass.

We can never guarantee to keep to a timetable. I have the experience of going round the country and hearing about assurances given infrequently by myself, but more usually by my predecessor or her predecessor, occasionally by Ernest Marples and once or twice by Hore-Belisha, which could almost be one of the 1938 proposals mentioned by my right hon. Friend. The reason why we can go ahead with proposals such as the Selby bypass is partly that we have more money.

It is certainly true that, with more than 160 schemes presently in the programme, the ones that we have been completing in the last few years have been made possible by the way in which the economy has been run. But that general economic argument will not bring much comfort to the people whose interests have been so well argued this evening by my right hon. Friend.

My right hon. Friend referred to conditions in one or two of the surrounding communities. The Riccall and Barlby bypass is nearing completion and I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for agreeing to conduct the brief opening ceremony later, when I know that the one he would really like to be attending would be that for the Selby bypass. The environmental benefit which will come 607 to the villages of Riccall and Barlby will be considerable and they are exactly the same environmental improvements and benefits which Selby needs.

We build bypasses for three simple reasons. The first is to aid economic development, whether we are talking about inner-city areas, where better access is needed, or particular parts of Yorkshire, because Yorkshire is too large to be seen as one community, although it is a mighty county. The second is for the environmental benefit of putting through traffic on a through road, preferably one which bypasses the community.

The third reason, to which my right hon. Friend referred, is to save life and limb. In general, a bypass will cut road accidents by about 25 per cent. It makes possible traffic management arrangements within the community that has been bypassed and that helps to bring about the kind of reduction in road casualties that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was able to announce on Monday when he said that the number of injuries and deaths had fallen by 12 per cent. in the first quarter of this year. In part. that is a reflection of the continuing bypass programme.

I want to pay tribute to the staff of the Department of Transport's regional office who spend most of their time trying to explain to me, and through me to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and other colleagues, why it is not possible to conjure up a road overnight. A six-mile bypass is longer than normal. The approximate estimated cost of the Selby bypass at over £10 million is a reflection of the substantial work that will need to be done by the successful contractors when we let tenders. For that work to go ahead we need to do the preparatory work as fast and as early as possible.

My right hon. Friend referred to the need to get rid of toll bridges on trunk roads. We hope to be able to get rid of the last two toll bridges by the Selby bypass and one other. Although my right hon. Friend did not mention it this evening, I have considered the point that he has made on other occasions about buying out the toll. The cost of that would be substantial and, if added to the cost of the bypass, might make the project uneconomic. My brief experience of going through Selby showed that the problems arise because of the combination of the bridge being a swing bridge, the toll collection and the inadequate width of the road in Selby. Together they cause the irritation and the economic disadvantage which the Selby bypass would remove.

608 My right hon. Friend referred to the A162 and the Sherburn-in-Elmet and the South Milford bypass scheme. That is a North Yorkshire county council scheme, as my right hon. Friend said. I understand that work is expected to start in the early 1990s, but I am in no way able to comment on that prospect because it is a local authority road, not a national one. It is too early to say whether the bypass would attract sufficient priority for transport supplementary grant support and I hope that that will not be regarded, to use the vernacular, as a cop-out but an accurate description of the situation.

We ask local highway authorities each year to put in their transport policies and programmes. We look at what they propose for transport supplementary grant — in effect, a taxpayers' payment of approximately 50 per cent. of the scheme. It is a competitive situation, and involves looking at the way in which the local highway authority orders its priorities and the benefits of different schemes across the country. In general, we look to give individual support to schemes costing over £1 million, which are of more than local importance, and which contribute to the movement of heavy goods vehicles.

I do not want to dampen prospects in any way, but it is too early to be able to give the type of assurance that I know that my right hon. Friend would wish me to give. Nothing would please me more than to be able to give the assurance on timing for which my right hon. Friend asked. We are talking of perhaps a year or so before we can come forward with the results of the work that is going on at present. We shall then need to look forward to the period of explanation to the public, to the opportunity for objections, to the inquiry on the line and side road orders, and then move on to the compulsory purchase orders and to the prospect of a shorter inquiry on those. I am afraid that there is no way in which I can say what the result of that inquiry will be, because otherwise it would not be as independent and impartial as we would want.

My right hon. Friend has done a service to his constituency and especially to Selby by raising this subject. I hope that my remarks are of some comfort to him. We are taking the problem seriously. Like him, I look forward to the opportunity of travelling along and admiring the new bypass, and of being able to enjoy Selby without heavy goods traffic passing through it.