MPs are united on A27 widening through Sussex

Both Tim Loughton in West Sussex and Maria Caulfield in the east want to see their sections of the road widened to increase traffic flow where the single line sections are struggling to cope with traffic.

The call from the Tory MPs comes as we unveil a report that argues how more dualled sections would benefit the county to the tune of £860 million.

This year the Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned international engineering and planning experts Parsons Brinckerhoff to carry out a study on the economic benefits of A27 improvement work at Arundel and Worthing. Remarkably, it concluded the combined economic benefits of up at least £850 million could be achieved – £540 million at Worthing and £320 million in Arundel.

The report also suggests up to 35,000 additional jobs would be created throughout Sussex.

The report said: “The coastal corridor is identified as having excellent development and regeneration opportunities that could transform the area’s economy and provide significant new jobs and homes. The largest of these are Shoreham Harbour and Enterprise Bognor Regis. Significant development opportunities exist in Worthing and Littlehampton.”

It continued: “The bypass will remove the current bottleneck on the A27 and will significantly improve the ‘attractiveness’ of the corridor in terms of attracting investment and inducing land development (through distribution and business parks etc); and the impact of these developments will include increases in land values (and land sale values) as planning permission is given for specific developments.”

In East Sussex Lewes MP Maria Caulfield is hoping to see the road widened from Lewes to Polegate.

She said: “I’m in favour of dualling the existing road and bypassing villages like Selmeston. That will make the road safer and less congested. Other schemes talk about cutting through our villages, which I’m not too keen on.

“It will be a long-term plan. If we can come up with a scheme that people are genuinely agreed on then the DfT and the Treasury team will get together and work it out.It’s in the manifesto, so it will happen, but we need to do it properly as well because we don’t want to be here in ten years time talking about how the new A27 is equally as congested and causing problems.

“We want to do it properly but involve all the communities that lie along the stretch of road.

“On one hand we have the A27 with Tim Loughton in Worthing and Nick Herbert in Arundel and South Downs, who are working very closely together to look at their stretch. But the stretch I’m looking at is from Lewes to Polegate. Those areas are wholly in my constituency, but I’m also talking with Caroline Ansell in Eastbourne and Simon Kirby in Kemp Town and Peacehaven because the knock-on effects of improving those roads will have benefits for both Brighton and Eastbourne as well.

“It’s really important we work together to make sure the road physically in my constituency that it benefits all stretches of Sussex.

“There’s been a lack of investment in this country for decades but now the economy is turning round we need to get a move on.

“It’s crazy that it can take me an hour to get from one end of my constituency to another, simply because the roads are not good enough.”

More than 750,000 people live in the A27’s immediate vicinity and little over 60 per cent of the road’s 67 miles of tarmac is dual carriageway.

The rest of the road boasts a single carriageway, tellingly through congestion hot spots like Arundel, Worthing and east of Lewes.

The government says more than 60,000 new homes and substantial employment growth are expected in and around the A27 in the next 15 years and the Department for Transport has declared the A27 a £350 million problem.

After years of campaigning and numerous false dawns, George Osborne finally pledged in December to transform the A27 for the better by announcing substantial investment to the Worthing/Sompting/Lancing stretch of the road, with the option of a full dual carriageway the favourite solution.

A new dual carriageway bypass at Arundel will link together the two existing dual carriageway sections of the road, while further work on potential capacity increases for the stretch of road between Lewes and Polegate has been touted.

A government feasibility study published in March recommended plans for 5.5km of new dual carriageway at a rebuilt Crossbush junction in Arundel, with a new bridge built over the railway line and a second bridge crossing the River Arun. Reports suggest these plans, among other smaller improvements, could be achieved for £188 million.

Elsewhere, widening the A27 to four lanes of carriageway at Worthing is on the cards. Improvements could come to the Salvington Hll intersection, the problematic Grove Lodge roundabout and Sompting Road’s Lyons Farmtraffic hell hole. This could all be achieved for around £97 million.

Gareth Jones, of Sussex haulage firm Roberts Transport, said: “The main concern is the A27 at Arundel, going along to Chichester. It’s always hold-ups and congestion caused by a load of traffic. It was meant to be bypassed years ago when I first moved down here but it’s never happened.

“To avoid the chaos we run our vehicles in the early hours of the mornings and through the nights now, which we’re flexible enough to do.”

Iain Reeve, transport boss at Coast to Capital Enterprises, said: “We’d like to see the road dualled along further, because at the moment it changes from being fast dual carriageway to a slow 30mph at various points. It just about works and copes but it’s not going to be what we need for the long term.”

In the mid 1990s ambitious plans to build a bypass at Worthing north of the downs were shelved – but only after . In fact momentum on the project built so much that the DfT compulsory purchased millions of pounds worth of houses in Worthing ahead of planned expansion work. But it all fell apart and, sSince then plans have been on the back burner and the houses were resold to residents. Now those houses could be snapped up again by the government as part of the plans announced in December – a move that would squander more public money.

Tim Loughton, MP for East Worthing and Shoreham and an advocate of A27 investment, said: “The situation with the compulsory purchasing of houses in the early 1990s, which were mostly on the Upper Brighton Road by the Offington roundabout, by Hill barn golf club, was shortly before my time. But It was one of the biggest scandals at the time. They threw a lot of money at it and then lost it when they sold them all shortly afterwards. That can’t happen again. This work needs to be completed.”

Chris Todd, of the South Coast Alliance for Transport and the Environment (SCATE), slammed the call for road widening.disagreed.

He said: “Many politicians of today have forgotten all we’ve learnt from the past. Numerous government reports have come out showing how road building doesn’t solve problems but makes them worse. Look at the M25, they’ve expanded that and it’s clogged up again.

“If you look at the issues in Worthing a lot of it is local traffic trying to get to work in and around the town that clogs up the A27. Combined with very bad planning decisions with building north of the A27 at Lyons Farm, that’s caused a lot of the problems.

“A27 expansion would be incredibly destructive and expensive and doesn’t make sense economically.”

Mr Todd said Sussex was “crying out” for cycle and rail investment instead of “bulldozing through the countryside”.

He added: “We have a parallel railway line that’s crying out for investment for starters. It needs to be speeded up with better facilities. Combine that with improved bus services and walking and cycling facilities, we can reduce large amounts of traffic on the roads.

“Traffic levels have also fallen compared to ten years ago so if you’re looking at a problem, and traffic hasn’t changed, why are we suddenly thinking we should spend loads of money on it?”

The DfT could not give an exact date for the start of its ambitious A27 improvement work, although Mr Loughton said that, after a public enquiry and consultation, work could start by 2018.

Tim Loughton said: “There’s no firm date for when work will start but the timetable is all running to plan so far, which is good.

“I’d think that next year there would be a public enquiry and consultation with different organisations like the South Downs National Park and so on, and work could start by 2018.”