Jim Shannon

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. May I congratulate the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking) on setting the scene so well? I will not delay the House very long, but I want to make a contribution from Northern Ireland, highlighting some points and then putting forward a couple of solutions. I live in a rural community and the only way of getting to where we want to be on a regular basis is to jump in the car and drive up the road. The Ards peninsula, where I live, has a road going down one side and up the other and one going through the middle, so accessibility to certain roads means that if one closes, we have severe problems. I am used to the journey into town being a wee bit longer than I would like it to be. To give one example, the roadworks in Belfast, which have been there for some time, have led to people missing flights, being late for GP appointments, late for work and even missing NHS operations in the Ulster hospital. It is hard to comprehend how that can happen. Even the buses cannot get through, as the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking) mentioned earlier. Even the fast buses cannot get along the road. To give some perspective of where we are in Northern Ireland, I see problems for small businesses, particularly when roads are habitually closed. One in particular is McClements’ garage on the Portaferry Road, Newtownards. The roads service cannot do anything about having to close the road. Insurance means that vehicles cannot travel up and down the road during major works, which means that the business closes and the garage owner has lost business over a period of maybe eight to 10 weeks. That has an impact on him because he does not get the traffic and passing trade. Can more be done to help businesses that are directly impacted by such works? We need better co-ordination. Let me give two examples: Mill Street in Newtownards and Loughries Road. This was a few years ago, to be fair. Northern Ireland Water came and dug the road up, then filled it in. The gas guys came along, dug the road up and filled it in. Then the third one, British Telecom, came along. It dug the road up as well—in the very same place, the same hole in the ground. The three utilities could have been better co-ordinated and could have done it better together. We need better co-ordination; that is No. 1. I want to give a second solution, if I can. I know that the roads service in Northern Ireland has done this. The Sydenham bypass carries a vast number of vehicles—thousands every day. It is a major thoroughfare, bringing people up from the Ards peninsula and Bangor right into Belfast, so that road is really important. The roads service came up with a solution, which was to do the work at the weekend. That meant that when people were going to work from Monday to Friday, the roads were available, but on Saturday and Sunday they were not. How did we do it better? We asked the roads service to work more at the weekends. I understand that it is difficult in times of financial stringency, but none the less it is not impossible for work to be done at nighttime when fewer people are on the roads and there is less impact. So, there are two solutions to consider, including doing the roadworks in the evenings and at weekends, as has been done in Northern Ireland. It is successful. I have one more quick point. Whenever the roads are closed, there really has to be a better way of letting vehicle owners and those who are travelling on the road know exactly what is going on.