Tory minister insists Government can be trusted on dualling pledge over A1 in Northumberland

The long-debated dualling of a section of the road between Morpeth and Ellingham was named last week among the raft of projects that will be funded using £36bn of cash that would have been spent on the scrapped northern leg of HS2.

That announcement came just a few weeks after a decision on whether to approve the project had been pushed back by a further nine months, the fourth time that verdict had been delayed.

But there remains scepticism over whether the project will go ahead, almost a decade after then-chancellor George Osborne rubber-stamped a £290m scheme to dual the same stretch of road in his 2014 autumn statement.

Roads minister Richard Holden told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the availability of the former HS2 cash was “the key thing” that means the A1 scheme can move forward at last.

However, a Development Consent Order (DCO) for the works is still yet to be signed off, with the latest deadline for it having been set for June 2024.

Asked why people should believe the Government’s latest pledges, given the A1 dualling’s storied history of delays and the controversial scrapping of HS2’s Birmingham to Manchester section, Mr Holden said: “That £36bn, which had already been earmarked for those projects, can now be used for other schemes. In the past, it has always been ‘is this going to be part of the Spending Review, is this going to be part of the RIS upgrade programme, or the next Network Rail settlement?’

“This money has already been earmarked for transport funding, so transferring it across is a much simpler situation.”

Mr Holden said that the nine month delay to the DCO decision is a “maximum for the planning decision, it is not a date that has to happen”.

The North West Durham MP added: “This cash which is now there for the A1… the key thing on all of these things is that you can design and work them up, but at some point you have to have the funding there. This funding which was earmarked for another project is now being moved to it, so the funding envelope is there.

“Obviously with the DCO as part of the pipeline, there is a planning decision that I can’t really comment further on. But the cash is clearly there for this project.”

But Coun Isabel Hunter, a long-term A1 dualling campaigner who represents the Berwick West with Ord ward on Northumberland County Council, said on Wednesday that she “won’t believe it until the spades are in the ground and the diggers are on site”.