Summer Adjournment

Jonathan Reynolds Excerpts

Tuesday 27th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

Before the House adjourns, I wish to place on the record the problems and concerns of my constituents as a result of road congestion through the villages of Mottram and Hollingworth, and mention the ongoing saga of the proposed Mottram-to-Tintwistle bypass. [Interruption.] I can see that there is a lot of immediate interest in the subject.

If any hon. Members have ever driven between Sheffield and Manchester, they will probably have been delayed in my constituency. The journey from the end of the M67 in Hattersley to the junction with the M1 in south Yorkshire is a nightmare. The Woodhead pass is a convenient route across the country that avoids the M62, but its popularity has meant total misery for my constituents in Longdendale. I remind the House of my standing declared interest as an elected member of Tameside metropolitan borough council.

The latest figures given to me by the House of Commons Library tell me that, on average, 34,000 vehicles a day pass through the Mottram Moor A road in Hollingworth. That is an astonishing amount of traffic for small villages to cope with. It means that people cannot leave their houses, that the noise is unbearable and that the pollution levels are completely unacceptable, particularly in the playground of Hollingworth primary school, of which I am still a governor.

Many Secretaries of State for Transport have visited us and promised improvements; in fact, I believe that one made the journey, promised us that something would be done, but unfortunately was sacked on his journey back to London. That may explain the reluctance of more recent Secretaries of State for Transport to visit the area.

I am sure that hon. Members are wondering about the legislative history of the problem. The plans for a bypass in the area date back to the 1990s. They were extolled in the Conservative Government’s “Roads for Prosperity” White Paper in 1989, following a public consultation process. A preferred route was selected in October 1993, but work was suspended in 1996 following further Government reviews of the national road building programme.

In July 1998 the Labour Government published “A New Deal for Trunk Roads in England”, which also included the bypass. In November 2002 the Highways Agency submitted a report to the regional planning bodies, and the local communities affected by the congestion presented a petition with more than 9,000 signatures to Downing street a few months later. I was part of that local deputation. The preferred route for a bypass in the area was not without its opponents. The very tip of the new road would have entered the territory of the Peak District national park, whose representatives naturally raised concerns. However, many objections were also raised by people who had never visited the area and wrongly assumed that most of the new bypass would be in the park.

The public inquiry into the bypass opened on 26 June 2007. After several adjournments to consider the evidence submitted, the public inquiry was adjourned indefinitely in December 2008, following the submission of inaccurate data by the Highways Agency. I shall stand corrected if this is not the case, but I believe that it got the length of the Stocksbridge bypass wrong. That should be a concern, given that it is the Highways Agency. After further delays throughout 2008, the public inquiry was abandoned, as the cost of the scheme had gone up steadily in the intervening years and funding had been allocated elsewhere. I have to report that as a result, there is considerable bitterness in my constituency at the performance of the Highways Agency.

To move things forward, Tameside metropolitan borough council, my local authority, began working on a wider solution, which incorporated a smaller new road with other traffic restraining measures. The scheme currently has resources allocated to it from the regional funding allocation, but we await the comprehensive spending review to see whether they will still be there in October. Local campaigners have been very demoralised by the lack of progress. I pay tribute to Mike Flynn, Bob Haycock and David Moore for keeping the campaign going. They know that they will always have my support.

The problem is national, not local: the traffic congestion is not caused in my constituency or borough. The Government must recognise that the problem comes from outside our area, and allocate resources to find a solution. I am not prescriptive about what that should be, but I feel that some new road capacity in the area is essential if a solution is to be meaningful.

Some will say that any new road capacity increases pollution, as it makes a journey more favourable for other road users. For me, that misses the point; the important thing about pollution in any given area is the number of receptors of that pollution—who is breathing the pollution in. If there were an increase in traffic in the Longdendale valley as a whole, the receptors would be the vegetation along the side of the new bypass or similar road, and that would be far preferable to the current situation, in which the receptors are my constituents along Hyde road, Mottram Moor and Market street in Hollingworth, and the schoolchildren in Hollingworth primary school.

Other options have been suggested as a potential solution, including, most notably, a weight restriction on heavy goods vehicles using the Woodhead pass. I am open to any ideas that would provide a solution, but my concern with the weight restriction is that it would damage the local economy in Tameside, which seems unfair given that the problem comes from outside our area.

Whenever transport problems are raised, this question should always be asked: is a public transport solution available? In all honesty, when I look at the situation in Longdendale I cannot see how that can be the case. In addition, it cannot be denied that the coalition has given us a new ministerial team at the Department for Transport who, rightly or wrongly, are perceived as having little interest in the subject generally. If the rumours are true, in October my constituents could face not only the loss of the money allocated to deal with the specific congestion problem but the loss of the new rolling stock for the railway in Greater Manchester, the loss of bus services in the area through the slashing of the bus operators grant, and rail fare increases of RPI plus 10%. That would be a very dark day for transport in this country, and it would cause significant economic damage to constituencies such as mine.

My constituents face an unbearable situation that the Government need to recognise and help to address. To refuse to do so—I say this quite genuinely—will lead to civil disobedience in the area. The status quo is not an option. I therefore ask the Deputy Leader of the House to make efforts to arrange for me and other local representatives to meet people from the Department for Transport prior to a spending review announcement, to encourage the Department to announce which A roads it believes to be suffering from unacceptable levels of congestion and announce a strategy for dealing with them, and to ask a Minister from the Department for Transport to visit my constituency to see for themselves the intolerable situation that my constituents contend with on a daily basis.