Real Business

Ever wondered why we spend so much on taxes and still end up with some of the lousiest roads in Europe? I think I’ve found the answer.

Rather than spend the money on tarmac, we’re spending it on paying civil servants to draw roads on paper. So my nomination for the most pointless consultation of the year goes to Promoting Connectivity between the Capital Cities of the UK: a consultation on revising the national transport corridors.

The 37-page document proposes that the A1 between Newcastle and Edinburgh be upgraded. “The capital cities play a vital role in the economic prosperity of each respective nation,” it effuses. Edinburgh, we learn, produces 13 per cent of Scotland’s GDP, in spite of having only nine per cent of the population.

 

Oh, good, I thought. At last, Edinburgh is going to have a direct dual carriageway linking it to Newcastle – something it is, oddly, still lacking more than 50 years after the beginning of the motorway age.

But as I thumbed through, looking for a map of the proposed route and a few artists’ impressions of the road junctions, I had a horrible realisation: the report is not proposing any new roads whatsoever. It is purely a paper exercise in labelling existing roads with important-sounding names.

Roads minister Mike Penning confirms it: “This change will not guarantee funding for major improvements; however it will finally recognise the road’s importance for freight and all other strategic travelling between Newcastle and Edinburgh.” Oh. Right.

So, next time you are sat in a traffic jam, you can take pleasure in knowing that the narrow, potholed road on which a tanker has just overturned has been recognised as a “route of strategic importance”. There are lots of them, apparently, linking our ten biggest cities and our five biggest ports. Or almost linking them. When the Department of Transport realised that it would be a farce to call the winding country lane between Bristol and Southampton a “route of strategic importance”, it decided that, in this case, there wasn’t a need for one.

I don’t know how many copies of this document have been printed, but I’m pretty sure that if you put together all the documents produced about the road over the past few decades, you’d have enough material to build it – in papier mâché at least.

It hardly needs stating that a road that served as the main route from London to Newcastle and that, since 1922, has been designated the A1 is a route of strategic importance. The first time a civil servant drew it as a dual carriageway on a map was in 1942. It didn’t happen then, nor in the flurry of motorway-building in the sixties and early seventies. Plans for a Newcastle to Edinburgh dual carriageway cropped up again in 1989, but were dropped, then reinstated in the early noughties and dropped again in 2006.

The Department for Transport no longer bothers to pretend it is going to invest in roads – just in a map of theoretical roads. And the planning for our theoretical infrastructure doesn’t come cheap. We spend a fortune planning and then cancelling projects: Liverpool City Council managed to spend £30m planning a tram system that was then cancelled by the government before a single rail had been laid.

What the A1 consultation is really asking us is: do you think the road between Newcastle and Edinburgh should appear on our map of jolly important roads as a) a big thick, black line, b) a slightly thinner black line or c) a big, fat red dotted line? I think the latter would look quite nice. But with a rising budget deficit and the cost of red ink being what it is, perhaps the Department for Transport should just do it in biro for now and then upgrade to a thicker, ink line when budgetary pressures allow.

Picture: source