Most roads are managed by local authorities. The Traffic Management Act 2004 placed a duty on local authorities to manage their road network to ensure the expeditious movement of traffic on their network and those of surrounding authorities. The Act gives authorities additional tools better to manage parking policies, bus lane enforcement and the co-ordination of street works. The Act has also created traffic officers to help to keep traffic moving and to ensure safety on English motorways. They are deployed by the network of regional control centres which monitor the motorway network and deploy a range of other active traffic management techniques, such as access control and hard shoulder running, to ease congestion.
What assessment has my hon. Friend made of the prospective traffic management system on the M42, and an experiment to use the hard shoulder?
I can assure my hon. Friend that before we opened up the M42 to the active traffic management scheme and hard shoulder running, we took base data so that we were aware of the existing situation. As soon as the system has been running for long enough for us to make an objective assessment of its success as regards issues such as safety, we will publish that. It may take some years to get sufficient data, but I can assure my hon. Friend that the early signs are extremely encouraging. As far as I am aware there have been no safety concerns, and the easing in congestion resulting from hard shoulder running looks to be exactly in line with international experience where that has been tried before.
Surely one way of improving the network would be to ensure that highways departments have access to the resources that they need to carry out road safety improvements. When I asked the county council to carry out an improvement in my patch, on a roundabout on the A59 between Sabden and Clitheroe, I was told that it did not have the money, yet we have had fatalities and many injuries there. Would not it be better to get county councils, the police and the Treasury to talk together about preventing the Treasury from siphoning off the money from road speed cameras, and using it on road safety schemes that will save lives?
The hon. Gentleman needs to keep up. We announced last year that after this year the netting-off arrangements would end so that there is no linkage between cameras and revenue to safety partnerships. Next year, the money will go back to the local road safety partnership and can be spent not only on cameras but on other road safety measures. If the hon. Gentleman’s local authority does not have sufficient money to do a piece of work that is its responsibility, I can only assume that that is down to the mismanagement of a Tory local authority.
The £1.2 million west midlands study mentioned by the Secretary of State concluded that the only way to reduce congestion was to introduce some form of road pricing. Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that the leadership of Birmingham city council, like other local authorities in the west midlands, has knocked back the principle of road pricing and is still consulting on that matter rather than on the practicalities of introducing such a scheme? Does he agree that one way of improving—
Order. One supplementary is fine.
Order. That is fine.
I share my hon. Friend’s enthusiasm for the potential benefits of road pricing. I can tell her that we have a good constructive relationship with west midlands local authorities, looking into how road pricing might work. One of the challenges in a complex conurbation such as the west midlands is that there are many local authorities with different political leaderships and different views on the right way forward. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I have to overcome the challenge of getting them all working together, but we are fully determined to do it.
How can we have confidence in the management of the trunk road system when the Minister told me from the Dispatch Box more than six months ago that he would write to me about the A303—which carries more traffic than most motorways, yet is not designed as such—and I have not heard a word from him since? We heard over the summer that the Sparkford to Ilchester improvements have been delayed until some future date, and that the sound reduction improvements that we were promised in 2004 are not in the programme. Why has the A303 been forgotten?
The A303 has not been forgotten. [Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Gentleman, who would normally claim to be actively involved in his local community and region, has not followed the process of regional funding allocation and prioritisation. It is one thing for Liberal Democrats to talk about devolution, but they clearly do not get involved in it.
As for my promise to write to the hon. Gentleman, as soon as the decision is made—he knows that it is extremely complex, and involves a great deal of money—I shall write to him, and many others.