Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Soames of Fletching Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

7. What plans he has to improve the road network in Mid Sussex constituency.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Jesse Norman)]

I will also attempt to keep Keats and Coleridge out of this answer.

Mid Sussex will benefit from the investment of over £100 million on local road maintenance and small-scale transport schemes in West Sussex County Council up to 2021. In addition, the county benefits from access to £304 million-worth of local growth funding over the same period which has been secured by the Coast to Capital local enterprise partnership.

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

Mid Sussex is greatly looking forward to the Secretary of State’s visit in early September to see the serious problems we have on the roads. Does the Minister agree that it is cardinally bad, rotten government to go on pushing housing into constituencies such as mine without investing in the infrastructure there in the first place? It is not a matter for West Sussex County Council; it is a matter for Mid Sussex District Council, which cannot go on accepting this volume of house building without a significant investment in dealing with these major bottlenecks on the roads.

[Jesse Norman]

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar]

Will the Minister accept that the improvements to the road system to East Sussex—

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

Mid Sussex.

[John Spellar]

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?