Sir Ashley Fox

I beg to move, That this House has considered National Highways’ traffic management policies on the M5 in Somerset. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Butler. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise an issue that sits at the heart of daily life for my constituents in Bridgwater and communities across Somerset. The M5 is Somerset’s principal north-south highway. It connects communities, supports local businesses, facilitates tourism and enables the flow of goods throughout the south-west. It is indispensable. Although the M5 operates smoothly most of the time, it is suffering increased disruption. It is now closed more frequently, and those closures are for greater lengths of time. In the two and a half years in which I have represented Bridgwater, the repeated closures of the M5 have become one of the most common issues that constituents raise with me. Somerset has a unique geography that presents challenges not found in many other places. The Somerset levels contain a network of rivers and watercourses that constrain opportunities for new strategic road infrastructure. Unlike other motorway corridors, the M5 has few realistic alternatives when it becomes blocked. A closure that might be manageable somewhere else can have profound consequences. That is particularly evident between junctions 22 and 24, where, if the M5 is closed, north-south traffic is diverted to the A38, which goes from Highbridge in the north through Bridgwater to North Petherton in the south of my constituency. The A38 was never designed to accommodate motorway volumes of traffic. What begins as an instance affecting one stretch of motorway rapidly escalates into a problem affecting entire towns and villages. Traffic backs up every minor road, causing gridlock. Residents of Highbridge, Bridgwater, North Petherton and the surrounding villages know only too well what that looks like. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that this is a recurring and worsening problem. Analysis of motorway performance shows that the northbound section of the M5 between junctions 23 and 24 recorded at least one hour of traffic moving at below 30 mph on 42 days in 2023. That rose to 45 days in 2024 and 47 days in 2025. That means that, by 2025, serious congestion was occurring on one day in every eight. Equally concerning is the frequency of the closures. Data from January 2025 to August 2026 records 24 full closures of the M5 between junctions 20 and 25. In June this year alone, there were four such closures. A road of such strategic importance simply cannot sustain repeated disruption on that scale without significant economic and social consequences.