Oral Answers to Questions Debate

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Department: Department for Transport

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Spellar Excerpts
Thursday 13th July 2017

(7 years, 4 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Jesse Norman Portrait Jesse Norman
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My right hon. Friend has made his point eloquently. All I would say is that the major roads network that we announced last week, along with the bypass fund, is specifically designed to be part of a wider strategy whose purpose is to provide the infrastructure that new housing development requires. That should be part of the solution for any of these schemes.

John Bercow Portrait Mr Speaker
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Order. This question has been narrowly confined to Mid Sussex, from which the right hon. Gentleman’s Warley constituency is a considerable distance away. If he is going to focus his question exclusively on Mid Sussex, not “and elsewhere” or “and other places”, we will hear him.

Lord Spellar Portrait John Spellar
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Will the Minister accept that the improvements to the road system to East Sussex—

Lord Spellar Portrait John Spellar
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Mid Sussex. Does the Minister accept that the road system to Mid Sussex would be considerably improved if money was diverted from the ever-deepening, bottomless pit of HS2, thus enabling those projects to move forward much more quickly? May I join my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) in calling for a reassessment of this increasingly troubled scheme?

Jesse Norman Portrait Jesse Norman
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Mr Speaker, it is a mark of your grace that you were able to allow the right hon. Gentleman to proceed with a question so evidently unrelated to the issue, so much so that he was not able to make it to the actual name of the constituency or the area concerned, although that came in the first 10 seconds of his question. The answer to his question, if I may dignify it with an answer, is that there will be plenty of investment in both sides of that equation.