A1: North Northumberland

Joe Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to open this debate on the A1 through North Northumberland. I have been seeking this debate for months. When I saw the time at which it was originally to have happened, I wondered whether someone somewhere had decided that this Scotsman did not really need to see the big match tonight. I am delighted to see that the business has been brought forward, and now I will be able to watch the game. On a serious note, this is a matter of huge importance, not just to my constituency but to the whole of the north-east of England. We should see it in the context of the question of how we push power, control and resources out to the regions through the devolution settlement, and how great infrastructure projects are delivered in the regions of this great country.

According to the Newcastle Chronicle, on 31 May, Emma Bartle-Scott said to her husband that they should not use the A1 as part of their journey that day. She said:

“I had a bad feeling that day…we had had the fatalities and I said to my husband that I didn’t know if we should go on the road.”

Her worry was proven right. As the Scotts neared the end of their journey, and waited—stationary in the middle of the road—to turn off the A1, they were rear-ended and pushed into the other lane. If the drivers coming the other way had not been alert, they would have been hit head-on at 60 mph. Thankfully, the couple are okay, but the dreaded necessity of using the A1 is felt deeply throughout Northumberland.

I would like to outline the condition of the road, welcome the support of the Government and National Highways for planned improvements to the road as part of road investment strategy 3, and advocate for greater investment in the road in the years ahead.

The A1 is the issue for my constituents. I am contacted about it daily. There is not an issue that I am contacted about more than safety on the A1. The road is a critical part of my constituents’ lives, but it is one that they would rather do without. The A1 holds North Northumberland back and is littered with overlapping problems. It is not a safe road. It has also become a bit of a totem for the frustrations of my northern constituents. They feel, rightly, that investment is always going somewhere else, such as the deep south—Manchester, Leeds or somewhere like that—instead of to the true north. With the new rules of the Treasury’s Green Book and, as I said, with a devolution agenda coming to Westminster, I hope that the Government will increase their attention to the road, now and in the years to come.

What is the current situation with the A1? It runs through nearly 50 miles of my constituency—the third-largest in England—from Morpeth to Berwick. I am a bit disappointed to be gazumped by my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris), who has the largest constituency in England; I should mention that the A1 also runs through his constituency. The A1 is part of the National Highways strategic road network, and it is the road from London to Edinburgh. It is the east-coast equivalent of the M6, which is a three-lane highway, even through Cumbria; there is no comparison.

The road is the central feature of my constituency. It is how my constituents get about—they use it in their thousands, daily—including me, my family and my team. Almost all of the 10 million tourists who come to Northumberland every year—many of them from abroad—will use the road in their travels, too.

Tragically, since the beginning of May, six people have died on the A1, with more injured, and 11 people have died on the road over the last year alone. My prayers are with them and their loved ones. Police data, which has not yet been updated to include the most recent incidents, suggests that since 2014 there have been 768 accidents along the A1 through Northumberland, from Seaton Burn to Berwick, 176 of which were serious—and 24, sadly, were fatal. Although the number of less serious accidents is falling, serious and fatal accidents remain persistent. No one should lose their life on our roads.

There are several problems with the A1. The first is the vast number of minor at-grade turnings—my office counted 140 such turnings from Morpeth to Berwick. At those junctions, stationary local traffic must merge with highway traffic along the same gradient, often on to a single lane. There are rarely slip roads to help build up speed, so the turnings are very abrupt. Cars wanting to cross to the other side must wait for gaps in traffic and time their crossings expertly. I am an experienced driver—I have been driving for about 30 years—and I find those crossing points, and especially getting from one side to the other, very worrying.

Some of the crossings are so narrow that long vehicles and vans extend into the road, obstructing traffic that is going at 60 mph—I saw that the other day. Those crossing places are among the worst elements of the A1 and are loathed by everyone who has to use them. Data from 2025 suggests that intersections are responsible for 43% of crashes from Alnwick to Berwick and 30% of crashes on the southern section of the route. Mention Guyzance, Charlton, Hebron, Chevington, Fenwick, Belford or Denwick in my constituency and people might think of those villages, but they are more likely to think of the high-risk junctions there.

The second problem is overtaking and unsafe driving. In 2021, the Planning Inspectorate noted that

“the A1 suffers more overtaking accidents than would be expected on a road of this type.”

Stretches such as Mousen Bends and the merging of lanes at dual and single sections are notorious. Indeed, my point was made when the regional director of National Highways and his team visited me to see the road last year. We did a drive up and down the road, and we had barely entered the single-lane section when we were overtaken by a car driving above the speed limit into traffic. No improvement to the road could fix such reckless behaviour, but the problem was emphasised by the merging of the lanes where we were. It was also tragic to learn that two recent fatalities involved foreign nationals. As North Northumberland becomes ever more popular in summer, tourists who lack local A1 know-how are risking their lives and those of local residents without knowing it.

The third problem is mixed traffic use. That is not unique to the A1 in North Northumberland, but it is quite unusual to have a road where there are ordinary family cars, heavy goods vehicles, tractors—every manner of transport that we can imagine. On the single-lane sections, that has the effect of slowing down traffic and generating driver frustration, leading to the reckless overtaking that I just mentioned.

Linked to that is the fourth problem: congestion. Average seconds per vehicle mile, which is a measure of traffic speed and congestion, are much higher than the national average north of Alnwick, and they are double the national average around Berwick and the Scottish border. Congestion on the A1 is so high because it lacks resilience and capacity. We talk a lot about road safety—as we should; it is the no. 1 priority—but the congestion wears down the people who live in Northumberland, as it is near constant. The single-lane stretches and frequency of collisions mean that even a minor incident has major consequences. Traffic is delayed and redirected through tiny rural villages, gumming up the entire region.

All those problems—risky junctions and crossing points, dangerous or unfamiliar driving, mixed vehicle types and slow travel times—contribute to one another and create a road that lacks safety, resilience and capacity. There is no silver bullet for those problems, but dualling would certainly fix some of them. In the north-east and Northumberland, when we mention the A1, the first thing people think about is the duelling of the road. It is a saga that, in many ways, has been going on for over 50 years.

In 2014, the Government promised they would dual the A1 from Morpeth to Ellingham, which is a 13-mile stretch. Between 2014 and 2024, the Conservatives in government did a variety of things: they left the EU, they went through five Prime Ministers and they saw the Scottish football team reach a major tournament for the first time since 1998. Yet one thing they could not do was lay 13 miles of new road in North Northumberland. The costs ballooned in that time to about £0.5 billion, and the funding for the project was quietly withdrawn in 2021. The project was briefly resurrected—to everyone’s surprise—just before the 2024 general election.

No one at any point seemed to have figured out an answer to the most basic question: where will the money come from? That is despite my predecessor for the area being, albeit briefly, the Secretary of State for Transport. While it is certainly true that dualling would do a lot of good for the road, it is also true that a particular dualling project was long dangled and never delivered. I am pleased to have seen the recent attempts at cross-party focus on the road, and a desire to encourage the Government to get to a place where we could get these safety improvements and, ultimately, dualling. I welcome that, and I will work with anybody who seeks to achieve that.

It is clear that what we need most urgently are sensible safety improvements that tangibly improve the quality of the road from Morpeth to Berwick. That includes improvements at key junctions, but also signage, markings, speed cameras and the like. Because of that long-promised dualling project, there have been no significant safety improvements on the road for over a decade. I was told that by National Highways.

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

As always, my hon. Friend is making a well-informed, passionate speech on behalf of his constituents. Is it not the case that dualling is necessary not just for the safety of his and my constituents, and those of all the north-east MPs in the Chamber, but for the economy of the north-east region as a whole? Does he agree that dualling would not just make people safe, but make the region better off? It would benefit the entire east coast of the country, enhance connectivity between Scotland and England, and save lives.

[David Smith]

Absolutely. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I will come on to that in a moment. This goes back to what I was saying about the Green Book, about the Treasury’s investment rules, and about how we decide where public money ultimately goes. This is as much about the economy as it is about safety.

Over the past two years, my office has been working with National Highways to deliver two route treatment studies of the full 50-mile route, in which National Highways has assessed what needs to be done to the road. We now know exactly where the problems are and what the road needs, and I am really pleased that funding has been secured as part of RIS3, so that the A1 can have the necessary improvements that make journeys safer. I am grateful to the Minister and his predecessor for the time and attention that they have given to the A1 so far. I also want to share my appreciation for the National Highways team at Yorkshire and North East, who continue to work hard on improving this vital road. Planning is still continuing, but I am looking forward to driving on the A1 and seeing new improvements for the first time in over 10 years.

As I hope I have demonstrated, however, the problems along the A1 are varied and overlapping. To be absolutely fair, they have been 50 years in the making and previous Governments, including my own, have not done what has been necessary with the A1. We also have to be honest that fixing these problems will require years of attention. It is not going to be possible for any Government to click their fingers and sort out 50 miles of the A1 in North Northumberland, but we have to make a start, and I wonder whether this might be the Government who will fix this road once and for all. I truly hope they will.

That is why, ahead of the next road investment strategy—RIS4—in the coming years, I want to make the case for everything being on the table for the A1. That includes ongoing uplifts to the road’s condition, major improvements at problem junctions and, yes, dualling the entire road. I have mentioned the Treasury Green Book a couple of times, and its reforms have made it clear that value for money is about more than cost and a purely financial return on investment. The new Green Book is squarely behind the ambitions of place-based growth and long-term transformation, rather than a short-term, purely financial yield, and economic benefit to the locality, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) mentioned. That means that regions such as the north-east can be prioritised based on how their growth can be unlocked, by recognising where weak infrastructure limits the potential for new housing developments, tourism growth or business confidence.

The focus on transformational change where a project might take decades to be fully realised is a quiet revolution that changes the way we think about improving the A1. All these changes must be acknowledged as we enter the RIS4 cycle. What consideration will the Minister and his Department give to the road as part of RIS4 and in the light of these Green Book changes? I fully support a menu of improvements to the road and believe that there is a sustainable case to be made for them.

There is also a political case to be made. When the £11 billion lower Thames crossing gets the nod ahead of the A1, and when the London to Birmingham High Speed 2 line costs as much as the GDP of Belarus, my constituents might be inclined to suspect that, just occasionally, there is a north-south divide. Northern Powerhouse Rail and the TransPennine route upgrade are great, welcome projects, and I am genuinely pleased for the people who live in those parts of the country, but what about infrastructure in the true north of England? If we are serious about devolution and unlocking regional economies, and I think we are, the A1 is the place to start.

In conclusion, the A1 dominates the lives of my constituents in North Northumberland. It is unsafe, lacks resilience and capacity, and is not fit for the future of a region that is booming in tourism and has so much to offer. It hangs over every journey that my constituents make. It hangs over my head every time I go up and down to constituency visits or to spend time with family. It is a mess of overlapping problems that chokes the region’s potential, and that is why I am so pleased that we have secured the first substantial improvements in over 10 years following Labour’s investment earlier this year. Instead of a long-dangled but never delivered dualling for the south of the constituency, we will have necessary improvements from Morpeth to Berwick. But I want to go further. My expectation is simple: a safer A1, including dualling. All options should be on the table.

If we are serious about devolution, I urge the Minister and the Government to apply these reformed Green Book rules and deliver maximum improvements on the A1. The Scott family who I mentioned at the beginning thankfully survived their collision. Others tragically have not survived, and there will be more to come. It is our job to ensure that we do all we can to minimise the risks of this road, and we have no time to waste.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Lightwood]

As a sand dancer—as someone from South Shields—I understand where the north is and the north-east is, but I hear my hon. Friend’s concerns about road safety, which is why National Highways is undertaking this work to see what additionally can be done to mitigate any safety concerns. I reiterate that £1.8 billion has been given to the north-east between 2027 and 2032, which could be used for improvements on local roads and safety improvements.

I welcome the continued engagement of my hon. Friend the Member for North Northumberland with National Highways on improvements to the safety and performance of this strategic route.

[Joe Morris]

Just to pick up on the comments around Treasury engagement, what is the Minister’s opinion of recent changes to the Green Book and the approach that Members of Parliament should take to engaging with his Department possibly now that the king of the north-west midlands is due to take up office? What should we be doing to drive that investment forward now that the rules have been changed and Ministers are considering perhaps a different context?

[Simon Lightwood]

I will come on to future funding, and of course National Highways and the Department for Transport will reflect and follow the changes to the Green Book.

I do not want to raise unrealistic expectations this evening: the Government have not reversed their decision regarding the Morpeth to Ellingham dualling scheme, nor am I announcing a replacement major capital programme tonight. However, that does not mean that nothing will happen. National Highways has continued assessing safety-focused options, and future proposals will be considered in the normal way for RIS4, taking into account evidence, affordability, deliverability and value for money, and any future improvements will be subject to viability and funding considerations within future investment programmes. Of course, I encourage National Highways to continue to liaise with the Scottish Government and local stakeholders.