Prime Minister Boris Johnson's article about the Union
Connectivity Review.
"I know there are plenty of people who think we should be going
faster out of lockdown. They look at the success of the UK
vaccine rollout. They see the falling numbers of deaths and
hospitalisations. They think the Government should hurry up and
bring forward the timetable. To all of those who want to speed up
I say, I understand your urgency. I share your desire to get back
to normal.
But we must recognise that the rate of infection is still high –
much higher than last summer. We can see the signs of a surge of
Covid among some of our European friends, and we remember how we
in the UK have tended to follow that upwards curve, if a few
weeks later.
We know how fast this disease can take off, and that Monday’s
successful return to school will inevitably add to the budget of
risk. The overwhelming majority of people – and businesses –
would prefer us to take steps that are cautious but irreversible,
rather than go backwards again. They would rather trade haste for
certainty.
So we will continue on the roadmap we have set out, step by step,
jab by jab, until we can get absolutely everything open, at the
earliest by June 21. Businesses know how much time they have to
plan, and to get ready, and we in government cannot afford to
waste a second of the coming weeks. Now is the time to lay the
foundations of a lasting and growing recovery. We will prepare to
clear the backlogs – from the NHS to the courts. We are bringing
forward an ambitious education recovery programme, with a new
focus on tutoring.
We are addressing the underlying productivity problems of the
economy, some of which have been neglected for decades. We are
continuing to deliver broadband, at breakneck speed; we are
offering a new Lifetime Skills Guarantee; and we are investing
massively in the clean and efficient transport projects that can
make such a difference to people’s lives and which are so crucial
for creating the high-wage jobs we need.
As we look at the transport network, there is a particular
weakness that has become steadily more obvious in the last 20
years. We have become far too segmented in our thinking.
For far too long, we have tended to carve up the country through
a devolve and forget approach. We have devised transport
strategies for Scotland, for Wales, for Northern Ireland and
Northern England – and yet, incredible as it may seem, we have
failed to produce a UK-wide transport strategy.
We left it, bizarrely, to the EU, which had a concept called the
“Trans-European Transport Network”. The UK paid handsomely for
our friends to draw these lines on the map, about 420 million
euros per year. We only got about ten per cent back. The result
is that the sinews of pan-UK transport have atrophied, with
inadequate connections, needless bottlenecks and endless delays
on the vital links between one part of the UK and another.
So together with Transport Secretary , I have asked Sir Peter Hendy to address the problem
of Union connectivity. He has just produced his interim report,
before final conclusions in the summer.
He lays out the scale of the challenge. Take the A1 – still a
single carriageway most of the way north of Newcastle and on into
Scotland, in spite of decades of promises.
Look at the delays on the M4 as it goes west into South Wales.
[Political content removed]. The North Wales economy has amazing
potential in aerospace and other sectors. But too little thought
has been given to the links to Merseyside and Manchester, to the
North Wales railway or the A55. It’s currently quicker to get a
train from Cardiff to Paris than from Cardiff to Edinburgh, and
why are we stopping HS2 in England? We don’t need a new line;
with some bypasses, better track and signalling, as Sir Peter
believes, we could run services from Glasgow to London in about 3
hours, and carry more freight too.
It seems wrong that someone flying from Belfast to London and
back pays more UK tax than someone flying from Dublin to London
and back. Isn’t it time to harvest that Brexit dividend and cut
Air Passenger Duty to support connectivity across our Union? We
will consult on choices to do that.
And there was one project that Sir Peter found to command
overwhelming support – the A75 from Cairnryan in Scotland to the
English border. It is a crucial route for south-west Scotland,
for traffic between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and
indeed the whole island of Ireland. This road connects three
parts of the UK – Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. But it
is a single carriageway. For 95 miles. This a long-term
arteriosclerosis caused by our failure to think as one UK. As Sir
Peter concludes his report, I hope he can produce the beginnings
of a truly pan-UK transport strategy.
We in the UK Government look forward to working with our partners
and friends in the devolved administrations, to see if we can
deliver this plan together – not to supplant their own agendas,
but to supplement them for the benefit of all the people of the
UK.
We want to improve pan-UK transport links so as to reduce traffic
and to reduce pollution, in a way that is as clean and green and
efficient as possible. It is time to begin to strengthen the very
sinews – the musculoskeletal structure – of the United Kingdom,
so that we can recover faster and stronger together."
Originally published in the The Telegraph