A14 (Tolling Proposals)

Peter Aldous Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to have secured this debate. I welcome the Minister to his new role. If he is as adept in this role as he was when performing his former duties, we will have a terrific roads Minister. He has had a baptism of fire, having already done two 90-minute debates yesterday, but I am sure he is coping admirably.

The A14 is a strategic route for UK plc. It is heavily congested in certain areas, and upgrading it is a national priority. The Government and councils are planning to invest £1.5 billion in upgrading the A14 and also the A1. However, the Government have singled out through-users of the A14 for tolling even though no other major road improvement scheme planned for the next 10 years is to be tolled. There is a risk that that will effectively amount to a tax on businesses in East Anglia—bad news for one of UK plc’s leading growth areas.

The A14 is a key route for traffic between the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe, and the midlands. Its importance is recognised in its status as a trans-European transport network, or TEN-T. It also serves commuters to the city of Cambridge, home to the world-famous science park, which is a fast-growing economic hub. In the infrastructure statement in June, the Government recognised the importance of the A14 and announced that the start date for the work would be brought forward two years, to 2016—a decision that I and many others greatly welcome.

The infrastructure statement included 24 other road upgrades, which the Government will fund in their entirety. I am proud that the coalition Government are investing so heavily in infrastructure, especially since the previous Government, frankly, did not do enough of that. However, none of those 24 other routes will be co-financed by tolling. Roads supporting other economic hubs and routes with significant increases in capacity will enjoy fully funded upgrades, including the M25 improvements at Tilbury, the A1 in Yorkshire and, indeed, the proposed A1 from Newcastle to Scotland. It was suggested that the £1 billion M4 relief road in Wales would be subject to tolls, but that was ruled out very quickly—almost within 24 hours. Singling out the A14 for tolling appears arbitrary and somewhat unfair.

I represent the constituency of Suffolk Coastal, which includes the port of Felixstowe. However, this is not simply an issue of the potential threat to that port, which competes against many others along the south and east coasts. Tolling the A14 will have a wider impact on many businesses in Suffolk, Norfolk, north Essex and Cambridgeshire. It is therefore no wonder that business organisations and local enterprise partnerships in those areas have come out against the toll.

Two toll-free alternative routes are being offered for all traffic, although each will add considerable distance and time to journeys. The existing trunked A14 is to be de-trunked and key infrastructure is to be removed, so capacity is being removed. That is in stark contrast to the only other tolled trunk road in the country, the M6 toll, which offered a genuine new road.

The proposals also do not reflect the fact that at the point of proposed enhancement, between Cambridge and Huntingdon, HGVs from the port of Felixstowe currently make up just 3% of traffic and are dwarfed in number by local commuters. I am afraid that the perception in Suffolk is that East Anglian businesses will end up paying for easing congestion for Cambridge commuters.

Considerable effort has been made to shift more freight on to rail. The Government are helping with that, and I welcome their investment in the Ipswich chord and the work to be done at Ely junction, which will really help efforts to increase the amount of freight moving from road to rail. European funding available to TEN-T projects has also been secured for those projects. However, I am not aware that any EU funding has yet been secured for the proposed A14 enhancement. I would like to hear from the Minister what plans there are to secure such funding.

I shall go through some of the key stages of the proposal. When we looked at the consultation, we were disappointed that the Highways Agency refused to hold a consultation meeting in Suffolk. All the meetings were held in Cambridgeshire, even though there is reference after reference in the consultation document about, in effect, forcing HGVs on to the trunked road by making sure that that was the easiest route to use and making other routes quite difficult to use so that businesses would end up using the tolled roads. The Highways Agency made a bad mistake there, which I hope it does not repeat.

The solution in the consultation removes the existing A14, including demolishing the A14 bridge, therefore reducing road capacity. I would like the Minister to explain why the parliamentary answer given to me by his predecessor, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), talks about increasing capacity when it feels as if capacity is being reduced.

I mentioned the issues for Suffolk Coastal and the port of Felixstowe. One issue for local haulage businesses relates to DP World, just up the road at Tilbury. Improvements are being planned to junction 30 of the M25, which is close to that port. It is planned that those improvements will be paid for entirely by the taxpayer. Although I am convinced that the magnificent port of Felixstowe will continue to invest and to compete with DP World, imposing tolling charges on one of its key routes adds additional costs for customers and hauliers. There is a real risk, which does not seem to have been taken into account, that container lorries will simply divert to the Al and the M25 at the expense of Felixstowe. That is certainly bad news for the port of Felixstowe and supporting businesses, but it is also bad news for UK plc.

It has been suggested that a tolling element is required to help to pay for all these infrastructure changes, but there has been no indication of how long the tolls will be imposed for. Will it simply be for the financing of the project? I received a written answer suggesting that the anticipated revenue is £30 million per year, but there has been no indication of how long tolling will last.

Tolling has been suggested for only one part of the road, the new A14 carriageway, which is the bypass around Huntingdon. The project has been designed specifically to force through traffic on to the tolled road. However, no charges are planned for the brand-new local roads that will be built or for the enhanced A1.

It seems contradictory to single out that one stretch of the A14, as the existing A14 is rerouted and de-trunked, when the A1, which will also be significantly improved, will not be tolled. The Highways Agency suggests that de-trunking the A14 addresses the Department for Transport’s ambition to place the right vehicles on the right roads, which suggests that the DFT is, in effect, forcing traffic on to the toll road.

The two non-tolled alternatives for HGVs in the consultation will push a lot of traffic on to the A428 and the A1M. Quite a number of hauliers are already starting to use the alternatives, as we know. There is a risk that the toll will have the unintended consequence that we see considerably more traffic using that route. We will end up in a situation in which people in St Neots are going nuts about how much traffic is going through their town. The situation could be even worse for St Ives, a pleasant little market town, as the other proposed alternative is to go through St Ives and then around the edge of Huntingdon. I hope the Department and the Minister are aware of those possible unintended consequences.

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. She is making a compelling case.

I was born in Suffolk. I have lived there my whole life and I have worked there for much of it. In that time, I have witnessed a dramatic growth in the logistics industry, based on the port of Felixstowe and mostly located along the A14 corridor. Does my hon. Friend agree that proposals such as this could have a significant negative impact on the logistics industry in Suffolk and on the Suffolk economy as a whole? Does she also agree that the Department for Transport needs to look again at this proposal and to consult properly with Suffolk businesses and Suffolk people, and that, if there is to be a toll road, there should also be a realistic alternative, although, ideally, the A14 should not be tolled at all?

[Dr Coffey]

I support my hon. Friend’s sentiments. The wider impact does not seem to have been assessed. In fact, there appears to be an assumption in the Government, which I think is wrong, that demand for using the A14 is completely inelastic to the toll. In fact, as the Department will know, there are basically two types of hauliers: first, those that definitely need to arrive on time; and secondly, those for whom cash flow is key. Adding to the cost of coming in and out of Suffolk and other parts of East Anglia creates a risk to our economy. This is an issue not just for Felixstowe, but for other parts of Ipswich, for Bury St Edmunds and for Haverhill, as well as for Lowestoft, which is in the constituency of my hon. Friend.