Labour over the Pennines?

Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves have talked about unlocking long-delayed infrastructure. Soon, they will have a chance to prove it, as they are asked to sign off the last piece of Clement Attlee’s roads programme.

In 1946, the Minister of Transport published the country’s first programme for a network of national roads (nicknamed ‘the tearoom plan’ after it was displayed on the wall of the Commons Tea Room). Most of this plan was built by the 1960s and 1970s, but one road – the A66 from Scotch Corner to Penrith – never happened.

The promise to dual the A66 has been repeated a lot. George Osborne promised it in 2016 Philip Hammond announced it later the same year. Boris claimed it as a key piece of his legacy at his resignation. Dominic Cummings asked for misfits and weirdos to speed it up. Liz Truss promised to make it happen faster.  And it runs through Rishi Sunak’s constituency, so he helped spruce up the design. It was declared a ‘Project Speed pathfinder’ in 2022, although it took Mark Harper eight months to reply to a letter giving it planning powers to start. By late 2024 construction work has yet to begin.

Now it is Labour’s turn. The thing preventing construction beginning is the availability of money, ahead of the government’s wider spending review. All capital projects about to make big commitments are pausing while wider finances are settled. The project is otherwise shovel-ready.

This is a decisive moment for the government’s infrastructure programme. There hasn’t been a transport upgrade all the way across the Pennines since 1971, when the M62 opened. There are more lanes of A-road across the Thames between Tower Bridge and Battersea than there are across the Pennines between Derbyshire and the Scottish border. Two thirds of all the trans-Pennine freight runs on the M62, despite the fact that the A66 should, in terms of pure geography, be the main freight route between Glasgow and London, and Belfast and Felixstowe. Upgrading the A66 shows that the government is serious about dealing with the infrastructure deficit.

In addition, action now can deliver visible results. The project has one very big virtue – rather than a series of small enhancements, it is a big end-to-end project designed to connect one side of the country to the other. Big duallings are normally done piecemeal, with a few small projects started and the grand plan abandoned before the end. We've seen at least 9 small upgrades to the A66, leaving the current patchwork arrangement; this upgrade is being done as a single effort, and will be of national significance when it is completed. The construction period, rather than being measured in decades, was once thought to be as little as four years. This means the project can be finished, or near-finished, by the next election.

In 1946, people probably didn’t imagine that it would be nearly 80 years to see plans turn to reality. But with the Budget, perhaps that day has finally come.