M1: Junction 28

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

Thank you, Ms McVey, for calling me. We have plenty of time to make our case. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mark Fletcher) on securing the debate and making so comprehensive a case that there is not much left for the rest of us to say, so we could get an early finish. But hey, we are parliamentarians—we should use the time we are given.

The junction is not in my constituency—it is 2 to 3 miles from the border—but, conveniently, I can look at the live traffic on Google Maps, and at 5 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon the delays have made it back to my constituency. That highlights the seriousness of my hon. Friend’s case. This is not an occasional problem; it is a daily problem. At peak times, the congestion backs up several miles in every direction from the junction. Something really does need to be done.

Every day, the congestion gets back to part of the A38 at Alfreton and Swanwick where there are houses literally as far from the M1 as I am standing from the Minister. Those people are blighted during the day and night by noise, and at busy times by fumes. At the very least, we could find a way of taking the congestion away so that they are not in that horrible situation.

The Minister probably does not know the junction—although perhaps he has driven along the M1—but it is actually a very large area, so there is plenty of scope for improvements. The reason such significant improvements are needed is that every time there is a new housing development anywhere remotely near the A38, the developer’s prospectus says, “Easy access to the A38. Great connectivity to Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, the M1.” What it does not say, of course, is that at peak times that connectivity is not quite so great, because vehicles will get stuck in a queue for quite a while.

Access to the road infrastructure—the A38 south, the M1 north, and the A38 going across the M1—is key to the attractiveness of investment in new housing and industrial development. If we cannot improve the situation so that people do not suffer all these delays, that will hold back the local economy. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover that there is a compelling economic case for improvements to the junction. If we want to drive the growth of the region, we need to sort out the congestion on the junction. It is not just about convenience and quality of life; it is about economic growth too.

My hon. Friend tried your patience, Ms McVey, by talking about other M1 junctions. The only other M1 junction I get near is junction 26, when I have to go the other way, past the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson). We have long campaigned for a link road to connect the A38 to that junction, which we have never had. In the absence of such a road, all the traffic that wants to get on to the M1 has to go up the A38 north. If they are not doing that, they are going down the A38 south to get to Derby and Birmingham.

If we do not get connectivity right, we push people into bottlenecks. If there are ever any problems on the M1 south of junction 28, or even on the M42, a lot of traffic will try to nip down the A38 to get on the road to Birmingham, which makes the daily problem even worse. People try to find alternative routes around a horribly congested road network as they go through the east midlands.

I agree that the case for improvements is compelling and really important to provide connectivity to residents of not just Bolsover but Amber Valley and other areas around it. We are not that greedy about the scheme that we would like. I would love to stand here and ask for a flyover on the A38 so that people can just keep driving and not stop at the M1 junction unless they actually want to go on to the M1, but I suspect that would be quite expensive—perhaps there is a business case for it.

We have rightly found a business case in Derby for an underpass and an overpass at the island to the south of my constituency. The problem with those schemes is that they will speed up traffic through Derby on the A38 north that will then just hit this queue. All that traffic will do, if we do not fix junction 28, is get to the end of the queue a bit faster and make it a bit longer. Sorting the junction out will improve the case for the schemes that the Government already have in progress.

As I said earlier, junction 28 is a very large junction, and the traffic island in the middle of it is huge; I think it is the place where loads that need an assistance vehicle to take them further north must wait. They park in the middle of this huge traffic island because there is nowhere in South Yorkshire for them to wait for the police escort handover—they are all done there. There is plenty of space to put more lanes on the island, or to reconfigure the lanes to try to avoid queues conflicting with each other and causing unnecessary tailbacks.

I have not seen any designs, and I do not know whether there are any in place, but there is scope to make some pretty significant improvements without spending a fortune on major re-engineering. We could just add a couple of extra lanes in the right place on the island and on the access roads to get traffic moving more freely and not conflicting. That would not cost tens of millions of pounds, but it would give much of the benefit that we need, and I suspect it could be done relatively quickly. We would not be waiting years, as we have in Derby, for complicated schemes to get planning permission and funding and have their logistics sorted out.

My case in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover is that there is a very real need here. This problem is happening on a very regular basis and causing significant tailbacks that impact the lives of people who live near the A38 and those who try to use it. It is constraining development of both housing and industrial economic growth in the area. There are solutions that are pretty easy to conceive and not that expensive, so I say wholeheartedly that the scheme should be brought forward as soon as possible. It will clearly meet all the various cost-benefit tests that are normally set for this sort of infrastructure improvement.