LETTER: More funds for northern route

The essential new point about the A27 scheme and the cost of a northern route seems to have been missed in both last week's Observer letters, and also by most readers of emails recently sent by me to the Treasury, the DfT, Andrew Tyrie MP, and others.

It’s recently been reported on the Telegraph website, regarding infrastructure, that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, ‘has also signalled that any fiscal stimulus in the Autumn Statement would be concentrated on boosting Britain’s roads and railways’.

If so, then the Government’s Road Investment Strategy (2014), which the DfT has cited in a reply as precluding a northern route, will be freer of Mr Osborne’s austerity constraints and could therefore be rendered obsolete. Surely, this provides the key argument with which to encourage Highways England to apply for sufficient additional funding that the fixation on short-sighted south-side proposals could be escaped, allowing reconsideration of the alternative northern route that a great many people now believe is the only practical and long-term solution to Chichester and other nearby A27 users’ main traffic problem.

Paul G. Ellis

Willowbed Avenue

Chichester