M25: Dartford

Debate between Gareth Johnson and Adam Holloway

Monday 14th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Holloway]

Absolutely—100%. A few months ago, I had Mr Potts of the Highways Agency in my office, and I got quite heated with him. I got him to admit that, however many crossings he built to the east of the existing crossing, he would at some point have to come back and fix the M25 at Dartford. It is possible to fix the problems of the M25 only if they are fixed at Dartford. Let me explain why.

There are several different types of traffic that all meet in the congested area between Dartford and Thurrock. First, there is what we could call national long-range traffic. Secondly, there is the regional traffic off the A14 in Essex and off the A2 in Kent. Thirdly, there is the local traffic—people going to hospital appointments or collecting children from school on either side at the exits in Dartford. The problem is that those three different categories—fast, long-range traffic to someone doing the school run—collide at Dartford and, into the mix, we also have to throw heavy goods vehicles and dangerous goods vehicles, as well as a huge amount of freight that comes in from the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke).

If we want to fix the problem at Dartford, therefore, we have to find some way of separating those three different types of traffic. As I have said, there were originally a number of options, including option A at Dartford, but none of them, including the current option C, meant new roads to connect one bit of the M25 to another.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Can he tell us why he believes that Highways England, the local enterprise partnership, the freight and haulage industry, Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, both county councils, Lakeside, Bluewater, the port authorities, the chambers of commerce —and the list goes on—are all wrong and he is right on this issue?

[Mr Holloway]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. I am about to provide an even longer list of people who are in favour of option C, so I shall answer his question then.

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[Mr Holloway]

I am really enjoying agreeing with everyone so far this evening. As I have said, for many years no one really thought that option B, C, D or E would be chosen. I remember one of my friends, who was the roads Minister at the time, saying, “Don’t worry; it will be option A, another bridge at Dartford.” I have every sympathy with my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford, and I understand his concerns, but we never thought that options that did not do something to ameliorate the M25 would ever be selected. Even the Highways England guy accepts that at some point you will have to go back and fix the problems of the M25, because the M25 is still going down that route today, as it did 30 years ago and as it will in 30 years’ time.

[Gareth Johnson]

My hon. Friend is being very generous in giving way. Does he not accept that the solution is not to funnel more and more traffic through the narrow corridor that is the approach to the Dartford crossing at Dartford? Should we not have more resilience, as we have across the rest of the Thames, and site crossings at various different locations? My hon. Friend seems to be advocating the funnelling of more traffic into the Dartford area, whereas the solution, surely, is to take traffic away and site the crossing east of Gravesend.

[Mr Holloway]

I think that the solution lies in any number of measures, but there certainly needs to be further capacity. I agree that we cannot try to squeeze more and more stuff into that collision of long-range national, regional and local traffic. I think that we need to seriously revisit the idea of taking Dartford and Thurrock out of the equation. I have spoken to tunnelling experts who say that that is eminently doable. We need—and it is perfectly feasible—a long tunnel that would start south of the A2 and pop out north of the A14, and vice versa, to swallow up the traffic. The effect of such a tunnel would really depend on numbers, and numbers are a moving target. As I shall explain a little later, Highways England is extremely good at making numbers fit whatever its argument is at the time. However, let us say for argument’s sake that 40%— it could be more, but Highways England would say that it was very much less—of the traffic that goes through your constituency, or hangs around for hours in your constituency, killing your constituents—

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[Mr Holloway]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He and I have been, not always successfully, driving around southern England trying to persuade people that what we need is a long tunnel rather than this road to nowhere. The other day I again had a couple of people from Highways England in my house and we were talking about this. I mentioned that 40% of traffic is long-range traffic, and the guy from Highways England told me that the figure was 12%. Can anybody listening out there in the country or here in the House who has driven on the M25 seriously think that only 12% of the traffic is through-traffic and that the rest joins at, let us say, Dartford or Thurrock and then goes on? It is clearly nonsense, and I do not know quite what is going on with Highways England.

[Gareth Johnson]

I hope we have some time for this discussion. My hon. Friend talks about Highways England’s modelling. Is he aware that it has modelled the possibility of having option C built and has discovered that it would increase overall capacity by some 70%? It has also modelled the so-called A14 option, which is the tunnel my hon. Friend alludes to, and has discovered not only that will it be prohibitively expensive, but that it will take very little traffic away from the Dartford crossing?

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[Mr Holloway]

Absolutely. One thing that I have noted in my time here is that we are told that certain things must happen or cannot happen. Back in about 2007, when we again had appalling traffic at Dartford, I remember writing on behalf of constituents to say that it was crazy that people have to pay money at the toll and asking why we could not have a free-flow system. We were told back then—I presume by the same people—that there was absolutely no way that we could have free flow because of some safety thing, but that suddenly disappeared. Quangos change their numbers and what they say depending on where the argument is going. We have seen that in some of the disastrous military ventures over the past decade. Officials do sometimes get it wrong. Ministers are prudent to listen to the experts in their Department, but that does not mean that they are always right or that they are always looking after the interests of ordinary people who, in this case, have to use the road for years.

I completely get where my hon. Friends the Members for South Basildon and East Thurrock and for Dartford are coming from, because when the question of a new crossing at Dartford came up, they would rightly have been horrified, equating it with more traffic. But if I were one of them right now, I would be on my knees begging the roads Minister to look at something that could separate the traffic out at Dartford, and I would be begging the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Transport, and writing to the Prime Minister.

[Gareth Johnson]

rose—

[Mr Holloway]

I will give way in a moment. I fear that something has happened with the political classes in these places. It has almost become a sort of truism: it is quite hard to go anywhere now. I do not know whether I am allowed to ask a question to someone who is about to intervene on me, but I will throw this out there: I would have thought that, if this were possible, my hon. Friend would love to see a long tunnel that could save his constituents.

[Gareth Johnson]

Yes, I would, but that tunnel would be east of Gravesend. I ask my hon. Friend to consider carefully the fact that any road system we put in place at the approach to the existing Dartford crossing—option A, the alternative advocated by him—would result in at least six years of roadworks and would kill the Thames Gateway area. It would kill the house building and enterprise that exists in that place and would be devastating for local communities, who are already suffering from pollution, which is going through the roof. I ask him to consider some of those issues and to understand that the option C route provides an alternative to all those downsides and can help seriously to improve the current traffic congestion from which we suffer.

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[Mr Holloway]

I thank my hon. Friend for that, and that point has been made by Bob Lane, who has been chairing the opposition to the proposal in my constituency. Understandably, early on, when someone raised the prospect of yet another crossing at Dartford, local residents were concerned that it would lead to more traffic, but they were not aware of the tunnel option. Indeed, I think that there are a few other options that would be considerably less intrusive than what they originally had in mind, which was another great big bridge, squeezing a few more lanes through.

Everyone in this country suffers because of the huge economic disbenefits of millions of hours lost to the economy because of traffic. This is an unquantified figure that is not in Highways England’s cost-benefit analysis. The cost-benefit analysis is traditionally used to assess the value for money of something, so it represents the ratio of benefits to cost. If the benefits of a proposal are smaller than the cost, that is, if the benefit-cost ratio is less than one—I am sorry to do this, but it is important—it would represent bad value for money. Generally, the higher the BCR, the better the value for money.

During the 2013 Department for Transport consultation on options for a new Thames crossing, it is telling that reducing congestion was only one of the five key criteria. A comparison of cost and value for money was carried out and BCRs were produced for option A and option C. In 2013, option A’s indicative BCR was between 1.0 and 1.8 and option C’s BCR was between 1.2 and 1.3. We then come to 2016 and Highways England’s consultation and the BCR for location A had gone from 1.5 to 0.9—that is, bad value—and for location C, it had gone to between 2.3 and 1.7, a complete turnaround. I say it again: they fit the numbers to suit the argument, in my view. That takes absolutely no account of the economic disbenefits of people sitting in that traffic for another couple of generations.

I am sorry to be slightly evangelical, but for the good of millions of people, over many years of misery, I ask anyone hearing this debate to tell their friends and not to say that they were not warned. We only fix the M25 at Dartford by fixing the M25 at Dartford. We have an historic opportunity to fix it for all those people living in the south-east of England, all those people driving through and, in particular, for the people of Dartford for whom, if I were in the shoes of my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford, I would be on my knees.

[Gareth Johnson]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in many ways this is a conversation and a debate that we should have been having 15 years ago? Frankly, it is outrageous that nothing has taken place since the bridge was built to tackle the increasing congestion and projected increase in traffic flows at the Dartford crossing. We are therefore playing catch-up after the failure of what has gone before.

[Mr Holloway]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. People in my constituency have spoken about him—people from Gravesham speaking about the Member for Dartford—and have said what an amazing fight he has put up over the years for his people, as has, more recently, my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock. I am not disputing that at all. He is to be commended for that. However, we now have a chance, possibly, and we should be looking into it. I remember speaking to him about the M25 a few months ago, trying to persuade him of this. I think there is a chance.

We should be getting Ministers to talk seriously to Highways England and the tunnelling firms. If we flunk this final chance in favour of a ludicrous scheme that has morphed from solving the misery at Dartford to include road capacity, economic regeneration and all sorts of other things, we will, even by Highways England’s own account, have to come back to fix the M25 at some point in the future. For 30 years or whatever the period is, people will have to sit in traffic if this bizarre decision goes through. I pray that in 15 years’ time people do not look back on us and think that we were the guilty men and women.

Dartford Crossing: Congestion

Debate between Gareth Johnson and Adam Holloway

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Johnson]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I would add the M20. It has been years—I cannot remember it happening in my lifetime—since we have seen any major improvements on the M20, A20, M2 or A2. It is high time that we had some road improvements in the county of Kent. We have increasing levels of traffic coming from the port at Dover through to the east of England and round to ports such as Harwich. Kent is being used as a thoroughfare. There are too many pinch points and too many roads that simply cannot cope with the amount of traffic that we have. A garden city is being built in my constituency. We have population growth throughout the county, which in many ways is welcome, but we must have the infrastructure to match that, and a crucial part of that infrastructure is investment in our road network, because the local roads simply cannot cope with the demands of the levels of traffic.

On whether there should be a crossing at Gravesham or Dartford, my argument is that another crossing at Dartford would give us years of roadworks. As a consequence, we would have more traffic squeezed into what is already a pinch point. It would be nothing short of a disaster for the town.

[Mr Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. It strikes me that we need to fix the appalling problem at Dartford—I was not aware of the awful statistics he mentioned on respiratory illnesses—but is not the answer, therefore, to fix the problem at Dartford, rather than unnecessarily create a whole range of problems for 20,000 people to the east of Gravesend?

[Gareth Johnson]

My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham and I disagree on this. Understandably, he wants a crossing, but not in his constituency, and I fully understand the reasons why. My argument is that if we had another crossing east of Gravesend, we would see far less of the stationary traffic that creates the most pollution. It is estimated that 30% of the traffic currently using the Dartford crossing would move east of Gravesham, where there would be another crossing, giving not only relief to Dartford but an alternative for the motorist. If we insist on having just one crossing point at Dartford, no matter how wide we make it, it puts so much pressure on the roads in the area that they will not be able to cope. One single problem on the M25 at Dartford can cause mayhem in the area. We need an alternative. Unless we have that alternative, there will always be problems at Dartford.

[Mr Holloway]

Does my hon. Friend not agree that the reason for the northbound back-up is that we have a tunnel bore? According to Highways Agency staff, the problem is caused by dangerous goods vehicles backing up. It takes seven minutes to reverse one. Should he not concentrate on fixing the problems at Dartford, rather than creating problems for people living elsewhere?

[Gareth Johnson]

HGVs that are too high and need to turn round do cause problems with delays in that area—

[Mr Holloway]

It is the problem.

[Gareth Johnson]

It is not the only problem.

[Mr Holloway]

It is the main one.

[Gareth Johnson]

The existing tunnels were designed for roughly 140,000 vehicles a day, and anything up to 170,000 vehicles currently use them. Inevitably, according to the laws of physics, there will be congestion at certain times going through the existing Dartford tunnel. So we have two options. We either build a crossing further away from Dartford to give motorists an alternative, or we put another crossing next to the existing one, putting an increasing amount of pressure on local roads that cannot cope at the moment. If we put more traffic there, even after the roadworks are finished we will have even more problems.

[Mr Holloway]

That is the point. If my hon. Friend wants to protect his constituents from respiratory problems, he has to have a way of stopping those great build-ups at Dartford. Of course the multi-billion-pound answer is to build another crossing, but another bridge at Dartford going northbound will help his constituents much more quickly.