Transport Infrastructure: Cullompton

Richard Foord Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to have secured the final debate of 2023. I understand that I have until about half past seven, but given that I am the only thing standing between the Minister and sherry, mince pies and wrapping gifts by the fire, I probably will not take the full two hours and 20 minutes.

I have a request of the Minister this afternoon. I am asking this Government to deliver the people of Cullompton a gift that everyone there has been asking for for years: the Cullompton relief road and the railway station. Cullompton is a rural market town nestled in the Culm valley. There has been a town there since Roman times—if you go out and knock on doors in the area, people will tell you that they have been waiting that long for the relief road and the railway station. The layout of the town would be familiar to anyone who has visited a small west country town: it has one major road, straddled by shops and houses. The town centre is very much the beating heart of the community. It has a regular farmers market that takes place once a month, every second Saturday. The economy of the town is built on a past involving wool, cloth and leather working, but in recent years it is very much a commuter community, with people making journeys to Exeter in particular.

[Simon Jupp (East Devon) (Con)]

Earlier this year, I distributed a survey across Cullompton to ask residents about their transport priorities. The responses made it crystal clear that a railway station was much needed, alongside a relief road and M5 junction upgrades. Residents tell me on the doorstep that new housing must come with infrastructure first, and they are right. While in the Department for Transport, I worked with the community and Conservative county councillor John Berry to secure a new railway station, after meetings with the Chancellor, the Transport Secretary and the Rail Minister. Local residents in Cullompton have waited long enough. It is time for decisive action, not just warm words. Does the hon. Member need a hand to get a relief road, too?

[Richard Foord]

My neighbour, the hon. Member for Exmouth, is quite right that people in Cullompton are calling for this, but they have had enough of surveys. They have been consulted until their pens have no ink left in them. In 2018, Devon County Council ran a survey on the Cullompton town centre relief road. Another survey, organised by Cullompton Community Association fields, revealed that people were torn but would give up their community fields for the sake of a relief road to stop the awful congestion in the centre of the town. Now there is to be a further consultation, on both the relief road and junction 28, on which progress also needs to be made; I will expand on that shortly. People in Cullompton are sick of being consulted. They want to see action, and in particular they do not want to see surveys that are simply a means of harvesting voter intention data.

Huge volumes of traffic pass through Cullompton every day. The town is home to roughly 9,000 people, but it is reckoned that 37,000 a day commute into and out of Exeter, and many of them are from Cullompton. Traffic often becomes backed up and gridlocked, especially at busy times—early in the morning, or when children are picked up from school. I experienced that at first hand recently when driving to one of my advice surgeries in Cullompton. So bad was the congestion that I had to turn the engine off to stop it idling and releasing pollution.

Planning permission for the relief road was granted by Mid Devon District Council in January 2021, not without cost to local amenities. I have played football with my children at the CCA fields, and I know that members of the cricket and bowling clubs would love to have better pitches or greens, but above all else they want certainty: they want to know what the future of the town will look like. What they do not want is an enormous amount of housing with no supporting infrastructure. The Minister and other Members will have heard about the appeals that have taken place, but I should point out that Cullompton is a special case. There are plans for a north-west urban extension, and also for a garden village.

As Members will know, garden villages were an initiative thought up in 2017, and the Culm garden village is set to add 5,000 new houses to the town. If that were accompanied by promises of a new GP centre, new community sports facilities, new schools, new bus links and new cricket pitches, those might offer some amelioration, but all that people in Cullompton are seeing is more houses. We cannot keep building houses without the appropriate infrastructure to support them. Our roads cannot cope with the volume of traffic that we are seeing.

Then there is question of the motorway. The M5 goes past Cullompton, and junction 28 is one of the more congested motorway junctions. In fact, it is dangerously congested. National Highways said recently that it was

“unable to support development which introduces an unacceptable risk to highway safety, which includes queuing extending onto the M5”.

“Development” is actually a euphemism for housing. What National Highways is really saying is that we cannot afford more housing in this town, because it will simply cause queues on the motorway—but the queues are not just on the motorway; they are also through the town itself. All the motorists who get snarled up in the town, idling in traffic, know that they should be looking to Westminster and Whitehall for the solutions. Cullompton Town Council itself has said that it will “actively oppose” any residential development at east Cullompton until the town centre relief road is delivered and the capacity of junction 28 is increased. That will need to include safe pedestrian crossings over the M5, the railway and the river.

It is about time that Westminster and Whitehall took a look at that, because it is something that MPs and candidates through the ages have called for. Certainly, in the Tiverton and Honiton by-election last year, the Conservative candidate and I both called for it. As Cullompton’s MP, I have raised the issue in Parliament on multiple occasions and urged Ministers to consider how the lack of a relief road is affecting people in Cullompton. In the local elections earlier this year, Cullompton went Liberal Democrat. I dare say that that was a sign of people’s protests, and an indication that they are not prepared to put up with being overlooked on this issue by the Conservative Government here in Westminster.

We saw the welcome Network North announcements this autumn, but the opportunity to fund the relief road was passed over in rounds 1 and 2 of the levelling-up fund and, although we did not know it at the time, in round 3 as well, when Devon did not get any levelling-up funding at all. With all the furore, anyone would think that the relief road was going to be enormously expensive, but in the context of the sorts of figures that the Department for Transport is dealing with, I suggest that £35 million is not enormous, particularly as £10 million of that has already been secured by Homes England. To get best value out of that, the Government will want to match-fund against that £10 million from the housing infrastructure fund, for which there is a deadline.

It is thought that the upgrade to junction 28 would cost a further £34 million. That is a much more expensive proposition, but a lot of work has gone into it, costing £800,000 so far. That has resulted in a robust and financially sound business case. The junction 28 proposal contained 25 options, such was the diligent work that went into it, and they have been whittled down to just three. The proposal has now gone out to public consultation, with a deadline of 5 February. Members will forgive the people of Cullompton for being tired of being consulted on these matters; they just want to see action.

The case for the relief road and junction 28 is also health-related, as it relates to traffic and congestion. This is why we also need a railway station at Cullompton. There was a recent announcement of funding to reopen Cullompton station. Again, Network North was something of a re-announcement, but we were certainly glad to be part of the restoring your railway announcement in 2020. A strategic outline business case was developed last year and it will go to a full business case in 2024, with the potential opening of Cullompton railway station in 2025. I work alongside my co-chair, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), as part of the metro board looking at every stage of the development and at how Network Rail and Great Western Railway are doing, perhaps giving them a little bit of a nudge when necessary but absolutely supporting their excellent work.

A railway station at Cullompton, along with the improvements to junction 28 and a relief road, will help with air pollution. The air quality management area in Cullompton has good monitoring, but I am afraid it reveals very poor outcomes for people’s health. It is estimated that the building of the relief road and the improvements to junction 28 would result in a reduction in the levels of nitrogen dioxide in the air of between 69% and 79%. That would clearly improve people’s health locally.

There are also plans afoot for walking and cycling. I have had people working with me on cycle routes in the area. Sustrans is considering linking Tiverton and Exeter through Cullompton, and there is a local cycling and walking infrastructure plan for connecting Willand and Uffculme. Together, all these initiatives—the relief road, the railway station and the walking, cycling and wheeling routes—will make a very friendly part of Devon into an environmentally friendly one.

In closing, I give credit to Neil Parish, my predecessor, who worked on this during his time as an MP, and to local Liberal Democrat campaigners who have been working with me on the operational details. I hope that we can think of today’s debate in the context of Christmas present. The word “present” in that context is usually associated with a gift, but I would like the Government to think of it in the context of the present tense—that is to say, I hope that we might see some action on Cullompton railway station, the relief road and junction 28 in the present and not at some unspecified point in the future. Those would be gifts for which I know that people in mid-Devon would be very grateful.

[Simon Jupp]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I seek an apology, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) did not name my constituency correctly in response to my intervention. He referred to me as the MP for Exmouth, but my constituency also includes Sidmouth and I should be referred to as the MP for East Devon. He has done this politically in local newspapers and leaflets. I wish also to clarify that Devon was successful, to the tune of nearly £40 million, in the most recent round of levelling-up funding, just to correct the researcher or whoever wrote the hon. Gentleman’s speech. I seek an apology for my constituency being named incorrectly, and a promise from the hon. Gentleman that he will not do so again.