Andy MacNae

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and thank you for allowing me to speak. I congratulate the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking) on securing this important debate. This is a matter of a disturbing level of cross-Bench consensus, I fear, because we are all largely saying the same thing. In my constituency of Rossendale and Darwen, single trunk roads serve the vast majority of the constituency and residents and businesses are delayed and constrained daily by the incessant roadworks they face, to the extent that several of the major employers in the valley, on which we are entirely reliant, are threatening to leave or considering leaving the area because of the costs to their business that the relentless roadworks impose. The situation is a constraint on growth and on people’s everyday lives. It would be fair to say that there is a complete consensus that something must change, yet we are constrained by the previous legislation—I think the last Act was the Traffic Management Act 2004—and it limits what we can do. There is a limit on the amount that can be charged as fixed-penalty notices for street works that overrun or do not follow their permits and a limit on the approach to lane rental schemes to 5% of a given local authority’s road network, but those are relatively straightforward things to change. I hope that, with this level of cross-Bench consensus, the Government’s imperative on growth and the recognition of the impact on everyday lives, we can make what I hope will be relatively straightforward changes and give our communities and our businesses the boost they need for roadworks that are properly managed and regulated, with proper and effective penalties for overruns that are, in many cases, inexcusable.