Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what recent steps he has taken to (a) tackle traffic congestion and (b) improve public transport in Stafford constituency.

The Stafford area has benefitted from the following Government funded initiatives to tackle congestion and improve public transport:

• The Department for Transport has allocated over £23m to Staffordshire County Council in 2017/18 for routine road maintenance and small transport projects. That included £3.711m National Productivity Investment Funding for highways and public transport works in 2017/18 to help reduce congestion and improve or upgrade local highway infrastructure assets and unlock economic and job creation opportunities. The Council also succeeded in securing a Challenge Fund award of £5m for the maintenance of Burton upon Trent river crossings.

• The Government provided £87.5m towards the upgrading of the M6 to Smart Motorway status from Junction 10a (M54 interchange) to Junction 13 (Stafford), which was completed in February 2016.

• The Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Enterprise Partnership has been awarded £121m over 3 rounds of Local Growth Fund. Funded projects include £24.3m for Stafford Western Access Route to ease congestion into the town centre and £6.5m towards a local sustainable transport package to improve access opportunities to employment, education and training.

• HS2 trains will serve the current station in Stafford. This will become an integrated high speed station where passengers can benefit from accessing the high speed network towards the South.

• The Stafford Area Improvement Project has removed a major rail bottleneck through the Stafford area, facilitating the introduction of new timetables, creating the capacity to run two additional trains per hour in each direction between London and the north west of England, and one additional fast service per hour between Manchester and Birmingham in each direction.