Transport Insights

Former transport secretary Anne Marie Trevelyan has said some interesting things about the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham dualling scheme but seems remarkably ignorant about the fact that her government shelved the scheme.

As I have written extensively, going back to this time last year, the Tories secretly defunded the scheme under the 2021 Spending Review.

In fact, based on a leaked report drawn up under the current government, the Newcastle Chronicle reported last June:

Subsequently, during the 2021 Spending Review the funding for the scheme was “withdrawn” and the plan was “deprioritised”. The report adds: “The funding decision was not made public, but we instructed National Highways to cease work on the scheme.”

Now, the same journalist is reporting comments by Trevelyan:

… speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service Ms Trevelyan, who lost her seat to Labour in 2024, insisted she and others had fought hard for the improvements.

She said: “They hated it because it didn’t meet the budget models that any road down south did. It was always hard work.
…
“The system was going to slow it down. We ended up spending over £60 million on all the prep work.

“Everybody was lined up waiting for the final stage to go, and Rishi pulled the plug and called an election. The project was sitting there waiting to go, but Labour came in and scrapped it.”

Trevelyan will have known that it was her government that defunded the scheme. She was transport secretary between September and October 2022, i.e. the crazy days of the Liz Truss premiership.

During that time, Kwasi Kwarteng’s Growth Plan promised to splurge money “accelerating” infrastructure schemes, including Morpeth to Ellingham.

But no money was formally allocated and when Rishi Sunak came in, the Growth Plan was binned.

Trevelyan says Labour “presumably took the advice of civil servants who would always rather spend money in the south”, adding:

This was about redistributing road investment away from the south east.

The North also deserves proper road infrastructure. It was hard – levelling up was hard, we were fighting a system. The civil service simply didn’t want to do it.

It’s not that they’re bad people. It’s that the frameworks that they work to continue to deliver that outcome.

It’s a political choice. They have to change the framework that the departments work to.

So that’s the economic case, but what about the safety case? As I have reported, last month local politicians used a recent, unrepresentative cluster of accidents to revive the case for dualling. As the Chronicle reports:

Calls to reopen the case for dualling have reignited in recent weeks following a string of tragic accidents on the road that saw six people killed in little over a month.

And Trevelyan joins in:

There have been some horrible accidents in all the usual places. It is ridiculous, it’s terrifying.

Cherry-picking an unrepresentative spate of fatalities “in little over a month” is bad enough but to do so when over a month has passed since and it hasn’t been repeated is taking statistical abuse to another level.

The piece ends with the usual statement from the Department for Transport:

Given the challenging financial picture we inherited, we have had to make difficult decisions on a number of road projects the previous Government failed to fund.

National Highways is actively working on solutions for this stretch of the A1 that could improve safety and congestion as part of the third Road Investment Strategy.

The problem with these two sentences is that the first undercuts the second, particularly as the government has just taken hundreds of millions out of the road investment strategy. You can always justify shelving something on the grounds of having to take “difficult decisions” about funding.