I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about the regulation of roadworks; and for connected purposes.
One of the great frustrations of modern life is queueing for ages in a line of traffic, inching forwards to get through a set of contra-flow traffic lights at the scene of some roadworks, only to then crawl past a large hole in the ground, heavily coned off, with absolutely no one working on the site, as you finally drive past it. According to data highlighted by The Echo newspaper, recent freedom of information requests showed that, during the 2021-22 financial year, there were over 77,000 street and roadworks in my county of Essex, making it the most dug up county in Britain and leading it to be infamously dubbed by UK Daily News as “the UK’s roadworks capital.”
London also has a major problem. Indeed, a black cab driver told me recently:
“in all my 32 years of driving a black cab Governor, I have never known the roadworks situation in London, to be as bad as this.”
However, the curse of prolonged and over-running roadworks is one that applies across the entire country, from motorways to country lanes, including in the newly bestowed city of Southend. My great friend, the late Sir David Amess, shared many of my frustrations regarding the regulation of roadworks, so while the Bill has 11 sponsors, as is usual, I confess that I like to think that, in cricketing terms, he is my 12th man today. I am also delighted to see his worthy successor, my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth), in her place.
As we know, sometimes, roadwork delays are due to utility companies carrying out repairs or maintenance, broadband providers laying new fibre or property developers connecting new estates to the power grid. In many cases, however, the common denominator is a lack of any palpable sense of urgency whatever to get the job done, regardless of the inconvenience which is caused to the travelling public. As a constituency MP who has received a growing tide of complaints about the spiralling frequency of roadworks in recent years, I propose legislation to try to finally do something about it. In short, I want to try to can the cones, and I seek the support of the House today in doing so.
The Bill essentially has three key aims. First, it would give local highways authorities much stronger powers to control the granting of permits to anyone who wanted to dig up the highway network. Under the 2004 traffic management scheme, permit arrangements were enabled, allowing utility companies to
“book occupation of the street for specified periods for a specified purpose.”
However, currently highways authorities can only really refuse to grant a permit on safety grounds and, if those applying for one deem the work to be an emergency, the ability of the authority to refuse is even weaker still. The Bill would allow refusal on the grounds of causing unacceptable disruption and would materially strengthen the hand of councils to negotiate much tighter conditions, including stricter deadlines, when granting permits, so that companies would hopefully be prevented from over-running in the first place.