South Middlesbrough: Traffic Congestion

Simon Clarke Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered traffic congestion in south Middlesbrough.

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to debate the Marton crawl. Contrary to what people might think, at the time of year when “Strictly Come Dancing” is all over the news, that is not our local equivalent of the Lambeth walk or the Harlem shake. It is the name that has been awarded over decades to the two-mile stretch of the A172 that runs due south from James Cook University Hospital to the top of Dixons Bank in Marton, Middlesbrough. It comprises Marton Road, Stokesley Road and Dixons Bank, and is the traffic bottleneck to end all bottlenecks. It is the source of misery for thousands of my constituents every day.

The A172 is the principal route in and out of Middlesbrough town centre from the south of the town, and it serves almost all the wards in the Middlesbrough South section of my constituency—Nunthorpe, Marton West, Marton East, Stainton and Thornton, Hemlington, Ladgate and Coulby Newham, as well as the small towns and villages of East Cleveland, for which Middlesbrough is the nearest urban centre, and the place where many residents work. The route is also used by people coming in from places such as Great Ayton and Stokesley, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), where the same logic applies.

I propose to take the Minister on a virtual journey along the Marton crawl, so that he can picture the situation for himself. The A172 is largely a single-track road, with some short exceptions where it widens to two lanes. Heading out of town the congestion really starts to bite outside the excellent James Cook Hospital. That is a 1,024-bed major tertiary referral hospital, which houses the regional major trauma centre. As can be imagined, it is a scene of well-nigh constant activity, with ambulances racing to and from A&E and thousands of vehicles carrying staff, patients and visitors to and from the car parks. Middlesbrough Council estimates that approximately a quarter of all the traffic on the Marton crawl relates to the hospital in some way. The junction where cars pull in and out of the hospital site is the first point where traffic starts to build up, and the second follows a few hundred metres on, where the A172 crosses the east-west axis of Ladgate Lane.

After passing over that junction, the road runs up the side of the busy Stewart Park, the treasured green space that houses the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum and the exciting new Askham Bryan College, which I opened earlier this autumn. By that point the traffic is properly nose to tail. I know it well, because I grew up just beyond Stewart Park on the Grove, in Marton. Since 1984 I have spent more time sitting in that section of the crawl than I have any wish to think about. Passing Marton cricket club on the right, traffic next comes to the old Marton hotel and country club, which, sadly, closed in October.

I will stop the metaphorical car here, and get out for a moment. The country club site is a big one; the hotel was large and sprawling, and accompanied by a sizeable car and coach park. It would be a prime target for housing developers. I want to repeat here what I told Middlesbrough Council in a letter last month: that it would be unthinkable for new homes there to be approved until the Marton crawl is resolved. New houses are the last thing that residents want at the country club site, and should any such plans be put forward I will oppose them fiercely. One of the main reasons is that the moment someone leaves the country club, they hit the slip road on to the main dual carriageway running out to the coast and Teesport, the A174. It is an immensely busy interchange, particularly at rush hour, and cars often back up right down the slip road as they attempt to get on to the A172 and the crawl itself. The fact that vehicles sometimes end up tailing back almost on to the Parkway, a 70-mph road, is a safety risk and suggests how congested the Marton crawl is at that point.

At that point, a journey may well have taken plenty long enough, but the worst pinch point is yet to come. It comes in the form of Captain Cook Primary School and the adjacent Marton Shops, a 1960s shopping parade that houses lots of well loved local stores. Traffic parking for the school drop-off and pick-up, and queuing to enter the shops, forms a huge blockage serving to inflame the entire route. Once that is escaped, the final leg of the crawl winds up Dixons Bank to the A172’s crossroads with Stainton Way in front of the popular Southern Cross pub. That junction was redesigned, badly, a few years ago, to replace the existing roundabout. The roundabout seemed to allow traffic to move more freely. The current lights, with only one lane heading south, are not helping the situation. Only once someone is over the crossroads do they escape, out towards the countryside. However, of course they know that they will face the same set of problems in reverse when they head back into Middlesbrough.

That is the reason why I have campaigned since before my election for action to be taken to tackle the Marton crawl. Local people agree. This summer I received more than 800 replies, representing more than 1,000 people, to the survey I ran on how the crawl affects their lives. More than half of those responding said they spend up to 20 minutes on a typical day caught in the crawl, and a third said they spend half an hour or more. My constituent Anthony Hopson used a powerful article in the Evening Gazette to describe a particularly nightmarish journey in September:

“As a resident of Marton I am well used to the misery of the Marton crawl…I caught an early morning bus from the Southern Cross into Middlesbrough; the bus that was already 10 minutes late…took 30 minutes to travel the length of one bus stop from the Southern Cross to Marton Shops and another 30 minutes to get to James Cook Hospital.

In all a journey scheduled to take about 20 minutes lasted well over an hour and 20 minutes”.

Mr Hopson continued:

“I believe one lady was due at Middlesbrough Court at 8.45am. Had the bus been on time she would have been half an hour early. Instead she was at least half an hour late.

A gentleman was so worried that he photographed the queue of traffic in front of us to show his employer.

The misery of bus passengers and the many hundreds of car drivers…and the loss of productivity can only be imagined.”

He commented:

“It would be interesting to know the level of air pollution along Marton Road—where there are two primary schools, at least one care home and our major hospital—due to the never-ending stop start traffic.”

Mr Hopson speaks for many of us.

The frustration that people feel is so great because the problem has been developing for such a long time. A bypass scheme, known locally as the “Marton motorway”, was first mooted as far back as the 1960s, shortly after my grandparents moved to Middlesbrough. The route was proposed to run parallel to the railway from Longlands to Swans Corner in Nunthorpe, spanning land that falls within both the Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland council areas. It was never developed and the Nunthorpe end of it has recently been rendered undeliverable by the building of new homes. That amounts to an unforgivable multigenerational failure of town planning by two councils, characterised by the inability to find a common way forward in the interest of local people and a lack of political willpower to drive a solution through.

In 2002, Middlesbrough’s controversial then Mayor, Ray Mallon, announced that he would solve the problem—and how could Robocop fall short?—but he was never able to deliver on that promise. Many people doubt that the Marton crawl will ever, or can ever, be gripped. After so many decades and so many false dawns, I understand why. The problem is worsening every year because so much new housing is being added in the south of Middlesbrough. It has long been seen as a very attractive place to live, with easy access to the beautiful north Yorkshire and east Cleveland countryside. I should declare an interest here in that my family and I are house-hunting in Nunthorpe at the moment—new developments have been added at an extraordinary rate in recent years.

I will be clear: those new developments are largely very handsome and bring much-needed council tax revenue into the town. However, in their pursuit of additional council tax, both my local councils, particularly Middlesbrough, have essentially ignored the impact of all that new housing on our local services and, most seriously, on our road network. I know that part of Middlesbrough better than I know almost anywhere in the world, and I can state definitively that the traffic has never been worse in my lifetime than it is today. That blind approach to permitting development regardless of the consequences is irresponsible and must stop until our roads are fit for purpose.

With all that in mind, it is beyond timely that the Government have announced their new £1 billion-a-year fund to improve or replace A roads across England. I warmly welcome the announcement, just as I welcome the word that the Secretary of State will be visiting my constituency on Friday to see the problem for himself. The departmental and ministerial team could not have been more helpful in addressing the Marton crawl, and I want the record to show how much their support is appreciated, not only by me, but by thousands of people in Middlesbrough.

While it is right that the Government are committed to delivering major transport projects of transformational national significance, great economic and social benefits can also be unlocked by resolving local road problems, and Ministers understand that. I would be grateful if the Minister, in his reply, would set out when applications to the new fund will open, what criteria will be used to assess their merits, what information local authorities will be asked to supply and when applicants will find out whether they have been successful. I would also appreciate it if he would agree to meet me and a delegation from Middlesbrough Council in the new year, so they can set out the plans in detail.

Those plans are in the process of being finalised. I am grateful to the officers of the council for the hard work they are devoting to drawing them up, just as I am encouraged by the way in which the council’s political leadership is now working with me on a cross-party basis to promote them. The plans include a series of redesigned junctions, as well as a new relief road from the Longlands roundabout to Ladgate Lane, which will cut out a key stretch of the crawl past the hospital and allow a second point of access to the rear of the hospital complex, which I believe will make a great deal of sense.

It is important that those plans carry the maximum level of community support. We will only have one shot at getting this right. Quite reasonably, it is an issue that arouses strong feelings, particularly where planning is concerned. I want to thank everybody who joined me at the packed Marton West Community Council a few weeks ago, and I know there will be a large turnout at the meeting this Friday night at Nunthorpe Methodist church, where I will provide an update on the latest news.

One of the key debates is over the planned redesign of the Southern Cross junction, the first element of reform proposals that has been brought forward for public consultation. Concerns have been raised about aspects of those plans, in particular whether they will simply displace some of the current traffic congestion into Coulby Newham, and whether homes on Dixons Bank will be blighted by access difficulties or by the removal of trees screening properties where the road will be widened.

I pay tribute to Marton West councillor Chris Hobson, who is chairing the Marton crawl steering group. Together with other local councillors, she is providing a strong voice for those affected by the proposed changes. I stand ready to raise issues with the council, and I want a solution that recognises the legitimate concerns of affected residents. With that in mind, I emphasise to Middlesbrough Council that, in the words of our EU negotiations, “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. Proposals should not be brought forward piecemeal, but as part of an overarching solution that can be presented to the Middlesbrough public and the Government in turn. Only if the Council brings forward a package in the round can we assess properly how the different component parts will impact the Marton crawl and interact with each other.

This is a good chance to emphasise that I believe public transport should form an integrated part of the solution. That obviously includes buses, but it is also well worth considering a park-and-ride scheme in conjunction with Northern Rail, given that the railway runs right through south Middlesbrough on its way to the main train station. Middlesbrough is unusual in being an urban conurbation where commuter and light rail is used so comparatively little. An imaginative solution would find a way forward. That would require co-operation across the local authority boundary into Redcar and Cleveland, which would be the only viable site for a park and ride, but the prize seems well worth seeking and I am ready to play my part in delivering it.

This debate has been a welcome opportunity to talk about the situation in Middlesbrough, and I am grateful for the opportunity to bring it to Parliament. My constituents have been waiting almost 50 years for a comprehensive package of improvements to be delivered. The Government’s new fund represents a suitably golden opportunity to prove that Ministers are listening, and that this Government will act where so many others have only talked. Working together with both central and local government, I am determined to do everything I can to mitigate the Marton crawl, strengthen my home town’s economy and make life a little bit easier for so many local people. If politics is the art of the possible, those goals seem distinctly achievable, and few matter more to me.

I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply, and hope to have the opportunity to sit down with him and his officials again in the new year.