Seaborne Freight

Simon Clarke Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Sadly, what was unforeseeable is the attitude of many hon. Members, mostly Opposition Members, towards the Prime Minister’s sensible agreement. The agreement meets all their requirements, and they are now saying they oppose it anyway.

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

The shadow Secretary of State and I both represent Middlesbrough, which voted overwhelmingly to leave, so I found his comments attacking the Secretary of State for making robust preparations for no deal very surprising.

Will the Secretary of State commit to engaging Teesport in the preparations for any scenario that may arise from Brexit? It is important that we make all the preparations required for all contingencies.

[Chris Grayling]

I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s comments. I reiterate that we are looking to involve other ports across the country as we make preparations for an eventuality that I hope will not happen. The reality is that the people of Middlesbrough voted clearly to leave, and they will not understand why the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) is letting down their 2016 vote.

National Policy Statement: Airports

Simon Clarke Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alan Brown]

Sometimes when we take an intervention, we worry about what is going to come and trip us up. That was so obvious that I did not see it coming. If the hon. Gentleman waits and is willing to listen to the rest of my speech, I will set out where I am going.

After forensic analysis, the Transport Committee recommended approval of the national policy statement, but with a considerable number of recommendations for consideration. The proposed expansion at Heathrow has the support, on record, of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, plus Inverness, Ayrshire, Glasgow, and Edinburgh chambers of commerce. Clearly, it has the backing of the GMB and Unite the Union. As the Transport Secretary said, it has the support of the Regional and Business Airports Group; it has the explicit support of Glasgow, Highlands and Islands and Aberdeen airports; and it has the support of Airlines UK.

As we will hear over the course of tonight, there are concerns about the proposals. Some environmentalists will never support air expansion of any kind. Clearly, there are local objections to do with the impact and disruption; I appreciate that MPs should represent the concerns of their constituents and I can understand why some are against the proposal.

However, given the general support that I have outlined, the Secretary of State should be able to pull this off, and for me this is where he has come up short. He has come up short on addressing the concerns of the Transport Committee, but where he has really come up short is on the protection of slots for domestic flights. My predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry), previously raised the issue of protection of slots and the need for point-to-point public service obligations. The Transport Committee highlighted the fact that further clarity was required on national slots in paragraph 3.34 of the national policy statement. This is where the UK Government are, frankly, all over the place. Paragraph 3.34 states:

“The Government recognises that air routes are in the first instance a commercial decision for airlines and are not in the gift of the airport operator.”

The Government then state that they will hold Heathrow airport to account. That is clearly a contradiction: they are saying that it is the airlines that hold the slots, but that they will hold Heathrow airport to account.

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

I do not understand what difference it makes where the flights are going to. If we want trade and business with the rest of the world, why does that matter? We want that business—why does not the hon. Gentleman?

[Alan Brown]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Frankly, as a Scottish MP and an SNP spokesperson on transport, it matters greatly to me where the flights are going. I want these flights, the connectivity for Scotland and the protection that we have not yet heard about from the UK Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)]

As co-chair of the all-party group on regional airports and the MP representing Newcastle International airport, I know that there are very passionate and strongly held views on all sides of the debate. Delivering aviation capacity is one of the most pressing infrastructure issues this country faces. It will be critical in shaping the UK’s economy, particularly given the very obvious challenges we will face with Brexit in the months, years and decades to come.

I have long made the case that where we build new airport capacity is not just an issue for London and the south-east, but a strategic, nationally important decision with implications for the whole UK, including the north-east. I firmly believe that expanding Heathrow, as set out in the national policy statement, is the right strategic decision for both the north-east and Britain as a whole. Indeed, Newcastle International airport, the single largest employer in my constituency, has also been very clear for the past decade that expanding Heathrow is the right decision for the north-east and that the decision needs to be taken now.

At present, the north-east benefits from up to six flights a day from Newcastle to London Heathrow, carrying half a million passengers a year, over 70% of whom use Heathrow as a hub to onward international destinations, many of which are long haul. It is clear, however, that without additional runway capacity at Heathrow, UK domestic routes such as those serving Newcastle will gradually be squeezed out as capacity is increasingly used by larger long-haul aircraft.

Indeed, Newcastle is already starting to see that pressure build, with the Heathrow-Newcastle route reducing to five flights a day in winter 2018-19. Many cities and regions in both the UK and overseas are seeking the Heathrow international hub link. The north-east needs to hold on to its well-established link, maintaining that frequency, because in the face of Brexit and all the challenges that that will bring, particularly for an exporting region like ours, the north-east can ill afford to lose further access to what is already its biggest hub airport.

Of course, Newcastle airport’s position on Heathrow expansion is echoed by the North East England chamber of commerce, which represents 3,000 businesses of all sizes across my region. It supports Heathrow expansion not just because of the clear connectivity benefits, but because it is determined to ensure that a significant proportion of the thousands of good new jobs and apprenticeships created will come to our region.

[Mr Simon Clarke]

Teesside has put in a bid for a logistics hub. Does the hon. Lady agree that this kind of sharing of the benefits of Heathrow expansion shows why shadow Front Benchers have got themselves into a really ludicrous position?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I agree that we need to share in the advantages. Just one of the firms that could benefit is Hart Doors, a family-run firm in Westerhope in my constituency, which has already supplied Heathrow with its high-performance security shutters for terminal 5. It said:

“Hart Doors has developed new products as a direct result of Heathrow’s procurement ethos…a focus on quality has required Hart Doors to find innovative solutions to meet Heathrow’s specific needs. The knock-on impact has been the development of new products that have subsequently been supplied to over 40 airports across the world. But Heathrow is not just a customer. Hart Doors also benefits from Heathrow’s international routes bringing in customers from long-haul destinations, allowing sales into markets that otherwise would not have been possible. Because of this, Hart Doors firmly believes that if Heathrow falls behind then Britain falls behind.”

This is undoubtedly why Heathrow expansion is supported by not just business, but the TUC, and the Unite and GMB unions nationally. They want to ensure that the UK can remain a world leader in the aviation and aerospace sectors, which are industries that mean high-quality, unionised jobs.

I recognise the important concerns that are being raised about noise, air quality and the potential impact on our climate change commitments. I would not support the proposal if I was not going to hold the Government to account on the mitigation that has been promised, but I feel strongly that this national decision must be taken in the national interest today.

East Coast Main Line

Simon Clarke Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

If we want to find a failing Government, we just need to look north of the border. I do not plan to devolve responsibility for Network Rail to the Scottish Government because I do not believe the Scottish Government are capable of overseeing it properly. They are messing up education and health in Scotland. They should concentrate on doing the things they already have right before they take on any extra powers.

The hon. Gentleman talks about there being no harm to Virgin-Stagecoach. It has just lost 20% of its market capital. Most people running a business would say that that is a pretty big blow. It is not happy about that, and nor will any of its shareholders be. We have changed our approach since this franchise was let. There are new risk-sharing mechanisms in place. Most recently, we did not accept the highest bid for the last franchise we awarded, and we have to continue to work on this. I have asked my hon. Friend the Minister of State, who is the rail Minister, to work closely with colleagues in the Treasury to identify the best way to ensure that we have the right risk-sharing mechanisms for the future, so that we look after the interests of passengers and the taxpayer.

The hon. Gentleman asks about the new partnership and the bids. This is a completely different paradigm. This is not another franchise bid in two years. We are looking at shaping a different kind of railway, and we will set out plans for that to the House in due course.

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

Can my right hon. Friend confirm that all planned investment in the line will continue and that the extension of direct services to Middlesbrough will be unaffected?

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.