Announced by Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, the move sees the Government invest in more than 100 new road schemes over this parliament and next, including 84 newly announced schemes.
Over 1,300 new lane miles will be added by schemes being delivered over the next parliament on motorways and trunk roads, tackling congestion and fixing some of the most notorious and longstanding problem areas on the network.
This includes £1.5bn of investment to add an extra lane onto key motorways to turn them into smart motorways, boosting connectivity between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Yorkshire.
In response, the Freight Transport Association said that the scheme is “good news for the freight and logistics sector.”
Malcolm Bingham – FTA head of road network management policy, said: ‘FTA believes that this investment announcement has significant benefits for the freight industry in setting improvements to journey reliability. The freight and logistics industry relies upon reliable road infrastructure to ensure that products are move efficiently and at reasonable cost.’
The Roads Investment Strategy sets out a vision for the Strategic Road Network and aims to deliver far greater consistency across the network going forward. As a result investment will be focused on delivering: a network of ‘smart motorways’ and ‘expressways’; improvements to support the Northern Power House (including announcing a new study into a trans Pennine tunnel); supporting growth and housing; better connections between key routes (e.g. Oxford to Cambridge) and to other end points (e.g. Mersey Port); and safety and congestion (including new study into the South West quadrant of M25.
FTA’s Bingham added: ‘Our challenge now is to make sure that these announced schemes are taken forward and the work that will be inevitable during construction is done with the minimum of disruption.’