Labour shadow minister calls for delivery of A1 dualling pledge before General Election

Peter Kyle, Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, was speaking on a visit to Hexham to launch Labour’s six “first steps for change” alongside newly elected North East Mayor Kim McGuinness and Labour’s Hexham Constituency parliamentary candidate Joe Morris.

In April, Roads Minister and Hexham MP Guy Opperman vowed to get the project to dual the A1 between Morpeth and Ellingham “back on track” following a series of delays.

A decision on the 13-mile stretch of road is expected on June 5, although that decision has already been pushed back four times – most recently in September 2023.

Asked whether Labour would commit to the project, Mr Kyle said: “We’re not in Government yet. What I’m not going to do yet is let the Tories off the hook.

“They have been in power for 14 years and they have been in power locally as well, having local MPs that should be championing this and they have failed. They have a few more months left of this rag-tag Government, their job is to deliver this now and deliver on their promises.”

Asked what would happen if this didn’t happen, Mr Kyle continued: “The Labour Party, if we win the next election, is going to have to pick up the pieces of Tory failure right across our country.

“There are eight million people waiting for treatment on the NHS, we have schools where the roofs are falling in, we have had practically zero growth in our economy for the last decade and no wage growth for 12 years. Whether it is universities, whether it is the NHS, schools or public services people are turning to Labour to fix these fundamental problems.

“If they leave us with one more thing to pick up in this road, then of course we will have to sort these problems out – but these are decisions that will have to be taken the other side of an election, when we know precisely how many things they have failed to deliver on in the meantime.”

It is now almost a decade since then-chancellor George Osborne rubber-stamped a £290m scheme to dual the same stretch of road.