A Treatise on Not Cutting the Mustard?

Some of the questions that have been puzzling us for a while now are:

How do you go about establishing the cost:benefit of upgrading the A303 to dual carriageway?

How do you determine if the cost is affordable?

What do we actually mean by "cost" and "affordability"?

These are more than just semantic questions because, to a large extent, they should underpin the entire A303 feasibility study now underway.

We would argue that while both "cost" and "affordability" clearly have major financial components, there are many other non-financial issues that need to be taken into consideration when determining the feasibility of any solution to the A303's problems.  This is a topic we will be re-examining from time to time over the coming months, but this week, we've had the opportunity to look at a couple of the issues - financial cost and national infrastructure resilience,  in a slightly different way.  Why?  Well, Network Rail were able to reopen the main Exeter to Penzance railway line, through Dawlish, to South Devon and Cornwall after the damage wreaked by the February storms.

The line was closed for 8 weeks and the repairs are said to have costed £35 million - but what does that really mean.

Shortly after the first storm ripped the coastal track apart, two other events happened that impacted on travel to Devon and Cornwall from the rest of the UK.  First there was flooding and a crash on the A303.  Because of flooding on many of the roads to the north and south of the A303, there were no alternative diversions. The only option for westbound travellers was to backtrack to Wiltshire and head north for the M4.

Then the unthinkable happened - a crash on the westbound M4 closed that as well.  We spoke to some fairly senior Highways Agency chaps a couple of weeks ago, who volunteered that the agencies involved in clearing this accident from the carriageway had been put under an immense amount of pressure to do so - and to do it damn quickly.  Mother Nature and Murphy's Law had combined to make the point that the national transport infrastucture to the west of England was not exactly resilient.  For a couple of hours there was no usable, direct east-west route across the south of England.  OK, it was only for a couple of hours, but even that ought to make people sit up and think seriously about transport resilience.   Every time the A303 is at a standstill, one third of the strategic routes to the West Country are not operational.  The same is true for the rail route and the M4/M5.

So what financial value do these routes have?  Is it possible to make a stab at the financial impact the rail closure has had?  Well yes, it is and folks in Devon and Cornwall have been doing just that.  Visit Devon reckons that the tourist industry in Devon has lost around £31 million over the eight weeks closure.  Visit Cornwall reckons the loss to the Cornish tourist industry has been around £18 million. 

The financial loss jusst to the city of Plymouth has been estimated at £1 million pounds a day - another £50 million.  Plymouth has a population of over quarter of a million.  As the population of Devon runs to over a million souls and Cornwall another half a million, then the pro-rata costs of losing the Exeter to Penzance line for 8 weeks has probably been in excess of £400 million, or £50 million a week.  So the financial value of 1/3 of the strategic routes into the West of England is £50 million per week - just for Devon and Cornwall.

If each of the three routes is equally valuable, then the same thinking could be applied to the A303 - which also passes through Wiltshire and Somerset and the problems on it affect both those counties too.  Lets be conservative though and halve the financial impact of the A303 on the residents of Somerset and Wiltshire, as we have more alternative north/south routes.   That would increase the "value" of the A303 to the economy of the West of England to £70 million per week:  £10 million per day.

So, as most traffic uses the A303 during the hours of daylight, the working day, that's roughly £1 million per hour.  Next time you get delayed or stuck on the A303 for an hour or two, just think of what that delay is costing the economy - and then add in your own and your fellow travellers costs - and a sum to compensate for the inconvenience, the added pollution, the stress, and the list goes on.

Now, let's be honest here.  We've taken figures snatched out of the air by others with no idea of their reliability, mixed them up with some fairly accurate demographics and then made a sweeping assumption about relative values of road and rail routes - at best a SWAG ( a scientific, wild-arsed guess).  But if decisions are going to be made about the future of the A303 on "cost" grounds, then these are the very types of numbers that we should expect Government to be able to present - but in their case, with a full audit trail. 

Anything less won't cut the mustard.

John Glen's A303 Blitzkrieg Continues

In yesterday's post we promised to provide more detail on the Commons debate on the A303 yesterday.  As John Glen MP has done a stirling job in putting it on his own blog, there seems little point in duplicating his effort.

So, look here for the details of the debate.

One extract from John's blog that bears repeating here, as it sums up the feelings of many in STAG and in the villages alongside the A303, the A358 and the A30, of all political persuasions, is this:

My constituents have been promised so much on this issue by many Ministers over many years; sadly, they have been let down every time. I am determined that they will not be let down again. I ask the Minister to commit today to ensuring that our hopes for the A303 can become a reality. I know that he is a plain-speaking Yorkshireman. I look for plain speaking in his response to us Wiltshire folk, who are fed up with constant words and little action.

Here, here, John!  Here, here.

John has also written an article for Politics Home yesterday on the A303, which is here, and his column in the Salisbury Journal this week will also focus on it. He was with BBC Wiltshire this morning and he will be continuing to speak to journalists today across a range of media.

We've heard mutterings in some quarters that WiSBAng must be a Tory mouthpiece, given the amount of coverage we have given to John Glen in recent weeks.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The person hanging over our shoulders as we write this was very active in running the campaign of one of John's competitors at the last general election and curses every time we thank John.  Frankly, this is an issue that transcends party politics.

The bottom line is that we will continue to support all those who make a positive contribution to solving this longstanding problem and we will bring to task those who are "all wind and piss" like some of the tanyard Tories of Wiltshire Council - as James Joyce might have phrased it and probably phrased it better even than John Glen :)  As we said, this issue transcends party politics, so we will be equally snarky about Lazy Lib-Dems, Useless UKIPs, Gormless Greens and Lacklustre Labourites. Praise will be equally fairly distributed.

Some Good News From John Glen MP.

We've just heard from John Glen MP that he has secured a 90 minute debate on the A303 on March 4th from 2.30 to 4pm.

It will be worth tuning in to the debate on TV/radio (We assume it will be broadcast) to hear the arguments for and, more importantly, to get the feel for any arguments against something happening at all, or quickly.

Please send any thoughts you have on the issue, thanks, etc.,  to John Glen directly at john.glen.mp@parliament.uk