Stourport Relief Road Fund

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to raise the issue of the Stourport relief road in this Adjournment debate. Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be well aware that Worcestershire is an astonishingly beautiful county, and Wyre Forest in the north of the county is a perfect example of what Worcestershire has to offer. We have the forest and the hills, not one but two Georgian towns, and the River Severn, with its astonishing valley and heritage railway.

The River Severn, the longest river in the UK, is a fabulous source not just of natural beauty but of water to the 8 million customers of Severn Trent, and it also divides Worcestershire and my constituency in two halves. Inevitably, this leads to crossing pinch points, and along the stretch of the Severn that runs through Worcestershire there are surprisingly few crossing points. The city of Worcester enjoys a number, but, to the north of Worcester, there are just four points to cross east-west before getting into Shropshire; even then, the next crossing point is in Bridgnorth, 15 miles to the north of Bewdley. Of the four bridges on the 38-mile stretch between Worcester and Bridgnorth, three were built by the Victorians and are not fit for 21st-century traffic. Just one bridge was built in the 20th century, and that is the only bridge that can really take any heavy usage.

The most recent bridge, the Bewdley bypass, was built to support the east-west traffic and relieve Bewdley of heavy congestion through the town centre, which has, for a long time, been on a major route from the midlands to Wales. However, with the incredibly welcome flood defence works going on at the moment in Bewdley, the bridge has necessarily been closed to two-way traffic, increasing the burden on other local infrastructure, and the congestion has inevitably put pressure on other crossings.

Of course, the flood defences will be completed by this summer, and normal service will resume in Bewdley. However, the problems remind us why, four or five decades ago, proposals were put forward for a relief road for the town of Stourport-on-Severn, just to the south of Bewdley. As a parliamentary candidate back in 2004, I got hold of a set of 14 proposals for road improvements for Stourport, from minor town centre improvements to the full £14 million—at the time—bypass.

It is important to remember the problem these proposals were trying to solve. Stourport has a complicated town centre, with a one-way system that everybody accepts is far from ideal. It is trying hard—and, by the way, succeeding—to be a tourist destination town, attracting a lot of people from Birmingham. Yet because of its location and layout, many of the cars in the town centre are not there to be in Stourport, but in Stourport to be on their way to somewhere else. It is important to remember that this stretch of the River Severn in Wyre Forest has a denser population than the wider rural community, with 102,000 people living in the three towns of Stourport, Bewdley and Kidderminster. As I say, it is an incredibly important conurbation in Worcestershire.

Of the 14 proposals, the most ambitious for Stourport was the most popular at the time. It proposes taking a road from the busy Stourport to Kidderminster dual carriageway, running around the town to the south using existing roads that were at the time designed to take the Stourport relief road and old railway track that had been closed under the Beeching reforms, and then crossing the River Severn heading west and landing in the cricket club, before continuing its semi-circular route to join the A451 to Dunley. It then heads off to the western part of Worcestershire and then on to Wales, providing a major route to Wales.

That was a popular proposal and it was signalled for further investigation and development. Back in 2010, the cricket club was looking for Sport England’s support but was unable to secure it due to planning blight—the prospect that at any time it may find itself bisected by the new Stourport relief road—so the proposals were shelved. Although they never disappeared, they were not moved on.

Since then, the Stourport relief road has been talked about as a lost opportunity, a myth and a piece of cultural history that a few people remember. So what has changed? What has happened since then? Why is this now something that needs reviving? I mentioned earlier that the flood defence works have temporarily brought extra pressure on Wyre Forest’s river crossings, but that will be resolved in the summer. However, the local population is due to increase significantly. Wyre Forest district council recently published its local plan, under which nearly 5,000 new homes will be built across the district. Around 1,400 of those will be in Stourport and that will, inevitably, increase pressure on local infrastructure. That is an 11% increase in housing stock across the district, and a 13% increase in Stourport itself.

The problems are more profound. To the west of Stourport, directly adjacent to the Stourport suburb of Areley Kings, is an area of beauty known as the Snipes. It is right up against Stourport, but is in Malvern Hills district council’s area. Malvern Hills district council is a multi-party coalition and it has failed to come up with a local housing plan.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this issue forward. I spoke to him beforehand to get his thoughts on what he is asking for. He is asking for what I have asked for in my town of Ballynahinch in Strangford: a road to bypass small towns so they are not decimated by through-traffic. We have been waiting for that for almost two decades. Does he agree we need to ensure the Government understand that investment in such roads will bring regeneration to small towns and can very well be a rising tide that lifts all boats?

[Mark Garnier]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He hits the nail on the head. I will be addressing these points a little later in my speech, but if we want to generate economic growth we need to build the infrastructure first—the growth will follow.

Coming back to Stourport and what is going on in the Snipes and with Malvern Hill district councillors, a number of developers put in an application to build 500 to 1,000 houses. It was met with absolute disdain by Malvern Hills district council, Wyre Forest district council, local parish councils, town councillors, me and my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Dame Harriett Baldwin). We all rejected it, but when it went to appeal, the Planning Inspectorate ruled that Malvern Hills district council had an unmet planning demand and accordingly granted planning permission against the wishes of literally everybody.

Through a quirk of geography, local government boundaries and poor management by politicians in Malvern Hills, Stourport will see hundreds if not thousands more homes relying on its town centre and facilities, but coming from outside the district. And it gets even worse. The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government told us that in Wyre Forest, we are to build an extra 617 new homes ever year for the next five years, putting yet more burdens on the local infrastructure. That is just Wyre Forest; the total for the whole of Worcestershire is 5,300 homes a year. Add to that 1,375 homes for Herefordshire and 1,200 for Shropshire—that is every year—and one can see how the congestion on River Severn crossing pinch points will increase significantly. A lot of that will come through the point in Worcestershire where the three counties meet.

The argument for the Stourport relief road has never been stronger. It is time to revisit what is proposed. I do not profess to be a transport infrastructure expert, and I certainly do not fully understand traffic flows, but I can understand what it is like to be stuck in a traffic jam. The current 20-year-old proposals may still be perfect, but my instinct is that we need to look again at the whole issue of traffic across the Severn in Wyre Forest, and at how traffic flows across the river.

It may be that we need to look at how to join the Bewdley bypass with a road heading south, to the west of the new, unwelcome homes in the Snipes to the west of the river, that then crosses the Severn to the south of the cricket club, joining the Worcestershire A449; or it may be that the Bewdley bypass should continue when it lands on the eastern side of the bank, as was originally envisaged, between Kidderminster and Stourport, bypassing our main town to the south-east and joining the bypass with the A451 Kidderminster Road and the A449 Worcester Road, going on through the A448 Bromsgrove Road and up to the A456 Birmingham road—all of that adding to the existing Stourport relief road and effectively joining all the major roads that serve Wyre Forest. This would deliver a comprehensive and very long-term solution.

All this is for the experts, and for the community to unite behind. I have already spoken to Marc Bayliss, the Worcestershire county council cabinet member responsible for highways and transport. He agrees that this is an opportunity, and has indicated that it will be worked up and included in plans for the county. The county council is keen to progress our local infrastructure needs, but it needs clarity. It is keen to draw up local transport plan 5, but needs guidance from the Minister’s Department on what is expected of it. My ask is for that guidance to encourage local road schemes such as the one I am suggesting, a scheme that will bring not just a relief of traffic congestion but a boost to economic prosperity of the kind that was mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and—this is important—for the guidance for LTP 5 to come soon.

I also ask the Minister to give clarity on funding. Of course we need funding and plenty of it—and obviously the Minister receives many demands for that—but as part of the settlement, it would be good to understand the status of the proposed reallocation of HS2 money, which was suggested by the last Government to be £209 million over the coming seven years. Additionally, we await the announcement on road investment strategy 3, which will cover the Government’s plans for the strategic road network until 2030. I understand that it has been delayed to align with the spending review, but can the Minister tell me when RIS3 will be published, and whether a Stourport relief road could be considered as part of those plans—and will she come and open the new relief road? It would be great to see her there, and I mean not just to cut a ribbon but to drive a Morgan sports car up the new road. We are extremely proud of the fact that some Morgan cars are built just down the road in Malvern, and it would be a fantastic opportunity for her to demonstrate what this Government are doing to support my constituents in Worcestershire.

The new Government are making a very big deal of economic growth, which is incredibly important—I think we would all agree that economic growth is a driver of good for our society—and that is one of the reasons they are keen to build new homes. We can argue across the Chamber on details of how to achieve growth, but the one thing on which we will surely agree is that growth is generated by investment in infrastructure. If we are to build these new, economically productive new homes, we must serve their householders with easy ways to get to work, to school, to medical services when they are needed, and to the town centres to relax and shop and enjoy their communities. The Stourport relief road is one such infrastructure development, which will not just support the town of Stourport-on-Severn and my constituency, but deliver economic growth to the wider rural west midlands. I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about my proposals.