Claire Young

Just off the M49 in Severnside is a junction that has never carried a single vehicle. It was built six years ago and cost the taxpayer £40 million, but in those six years not a car, van or lorry has used it. The national press has dubbed it the “ghost junction”. I am grateful for the opportunity to bring this matter before the House today, because the future of the M49 Severnside junction is one of real consequence for my constituents in Thornbury and Yate. I am here because I want the junction to be fixed and so do my constituents. I hope the Minister listens and acts: doing something about this kind of issue is exactly how he can show people he is here to serve them and not himself. We are all quite fed up with ineptitude. First, some housekeeping. In a response to my letter, the Department referred to this as the Avonmouth junction. It is not in Avonmouth. The Avonmouth spur lies some three miles down the motorway. This junction sits in Severnside. I raise that because a botched junction whose supposed name is three miles adrift from where it stands tells us something about how far the responsible authorities are from the reality on the ground. I would be grateful if the Minister adopted the correct description in his own dealings, so that there is no confusion in the future. I would not want the right hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) to think that I am in any way moving the boundaries of our constituencies. Let me set out the background briefly. National Highways built this junction in 2020, at a cost of £40 million to the taxpayer. It was designed to connect the motorway to the Severnside enterprise area, one of the largest concentrations of industry and logistics in the west of England, and it was forecast to support some 14,000 jobs. Yet in the six years since, not a single vehicle has used it. There is a reason for that. Ever since it was built, the junction has stood unconnected to the local network, because the short stretch of road linking it to the estate had not been built, and no one would agree who was responsible for building it. In a letter to me, the Minister blamed a private developer for this. Questions could be raised around whether National Highways and the previous council Administration could have secured an enforceable agreement, but I will not rehearse that whole saga tonight. It is at last being resolved. South Gloucestershire council has taken the work on itself, with funding from the Department. Construction is under way. The council expects it to be finished by the end of this year. I want to put on record my recognition of the councillors and council officers who stepped in to deliver what others would not. They have done their part. However, that issue is not the reason I have sought this debate. We have now learned that the junction itself is defective. National Highways has admitted that it has identified defects at the junction that must be repaired before it can safely open to traffic. A junction built by National Highways, completed six years ago and signed off as finished, cannot safely carry traffic until National Highways repairs it—is the Minister as baffled as I am? National Highways has set out no programme for those repairs and no timetable for opening. The council has been told that there will be no further update until later this autumn, and the Roads Minister echoed that to me personally in response to my recent letter. To enlighten the Government, the traffic that the junction would have carried has not simply vanished. Instead, it runs through my constituency’s small country lanes—heavy goods vehicles, day and night, on roads that were never built to carry them. Residents in villages and isolated homes live with the noise and the lights of lorries passing at all hours. How can residents feel safe crossing their own roads? A parent with a pushchair should not have to weigh up whether it is safe to step out of their front door. Cyclists and runners have to tread carefully through what should be peaceful country lanes. When National Highways told me about the problem, it saw businesses as stakeholders, but not local residents. My constituents vehemently disagree. It is not just the smallest roads that are affected. Councillors and constituents alike tell me that the A403, the B4461 and others are facing misuse by HGVs. Horse riders, agricultural vehicles and families are finding it difficult to access those roads—if the Minister is looking for a way to apologise to my constituents for this debacle once it is fixed, he could do worse than providing permanent safety improvements on roads such as the A403. One constituent has told me that, over just 15 minutes, he recorded multiple HGVs seemingly over 7.5 tonnes using the B4461 despite environmental weight restrictions. This is a regular issue in Hallen, too. My constituents tell me that it is difficult to report those vehicles, because the short time they get to see them is not enough to grab the registration and other necessary details. They feel that the companies using the roads pay lip service, but never take concrete action. I am totally against those vehicles breaching the weight limit in this way, but I understand the motivation: they have no direct access to the motorway. The businesses of Severnside continue to wait. This is a major logistics centre, and its operators depend on efficient access to the motorway and the docks. Every year the junction stays shut is a year of longer routes and higher costs. The economic case for this junction was made years ago and accepted by the then Government, but the delivery has lagged behind. I need not explain to the Minister why getting this junction functional is so important to the economic aims of this Government. Further costs are falling on the council and local people. The council spent scarce funds on repairing the very roads that this delay will now be damaging. HGVs continue to blitz through country lanes, and newly repaired roads will only be subject to the same continuous pressure for longer. The council expected the roads to be used by local people, which is why they repaired them now. From the perspective of both local people and the public purse, it is utterly farcical just how much money and effort is being wasted due to the delays in opening the junction. The council will now have to find the money to mend those roads once again after traffic finally arrives on the junction—I need not explain why the funds are not there. This is public money spent once, and needed again, to repair damage caused by a failure that was not of the local authority’s making. This Government’s devolution agenda will be undermined if situations like this are not put right for local communities. National Highways is not a private developer the Minister can gesture towards; it is an organisation answerable to the Minister’s Department. When it builds a junction that does not work and then declines to say when it will put that right, I must ask the Minister to justify its approach. My constituents and I find that approach unacceptable. I understand that there may be legal issues and investigations that the Minister cannot reveal, but the lack of communication from the Department has been shocking. I want to raise one further concern, which I raise as a question, not as a claim. I understand that this junction used a novel construction technique, and that one other location where that technique has been used has been identified as defective. The House deserves to know whether these are isolated faults, or two instances of something more systemic in how these structures were built and signed off. If it is the latter, that is a far graver matter than one junction in Severnside, and the Minister would be wise to get ahead of it. He may recall that National Highways already has something of a record in my area, because we have a large amount of motorway infrastructure that was built in the 1960s, and we recently endured a three-year road closure when a bridge over the M4 had to be closed for safety reasons and completely replaced. We already have an ageing infrastructure; if we are adding new problems, that is worrying. I will close with a few questions, and I ask the Minister to answer each of them directly. First, will he require National Highways to publish a clear timetable for the repairs, rather than the open-ended promise of an update at some point this autumn? Secondly, will he tell the House what the defects actually are and when they were first identified, given that the junction was declared complete in 2019? Thirdly, will he commit to a firm date by which this junction will finally open to traffic? Fourthly, will he establish how a newly built junction came to need structural repair before carrying a single vehicle, and whether the same fault affects other National Highways structures? Fifthly, who is responsible? Will this Government do what is right and launch an investigation so that the public and all stakeholders can properly scrutinise those responsible? Sixthly, will he provide additional funding for the council to repair the roads again, once the junction is finally open? My constituents have waited six years. They have watched a £40 million junction sit empty above a motorway that they cannot access using the junction, and they have carried the traffic and the disturbance in the meantime. They are not asking for much; they are asking for a date and for someone, at last, to take responsibility. I hope the Minister can give both tonight.