Transport Infrastructure (Yorkshire and Humberside)

Thank you, Mr. Chope, for calling me to speak in this debate. First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) on securing this important debate and I am glad that he put on the record that Humberside no longer exists as an administrative area. Other hon. Members have already mentioned this, but I would also like to say that I welcomed the Minister's announcement yesterday of money to repair roads damaged by floods. North Lincolnshire council will receive £1.5 million from the Government to assist it in road repairs, so I thank her for that. I want to set the scene a wee bit. Everyone today has been talking about Yorkshire and we have this little bit added on to the name of the region, called the Humber, which is actually the name of a river. The area that I represent is, in fact, in Lincolnshire, so I want to set the scene about that part of the region. The port of Immingham is the transport hub of the area. About 64 million tonnes of cargo go through Immingham every year. Twenty per cent. of the UK's freight begins or ends its journey on the south Humber bank. The south Humber bank is also an industrial area with many major British industries involved there. It also contains most of Britain's oil refining capacity. We also have Grimsby docks adding to the trade that is going in and out of the area, particularly with cars being imported and exported. That description should give hon. Members a bit of an idea of the pressure on transport infrastructure in the area. The main east-west route, linking the docks to the A1 and M1, is the M180/A180. That road has a concrete surface. As the Minister will know, roads with a concrete surface are very noisy and, with the increase in volume of heavy goods traffic on that particular road, the noise is getting worse. The Government have resurfaced part of it. However, because that resurfacing has been so successful, local people are lobbying to have the rest of the road resurfaced. I recently met the Minister and the Secretary of State for Transport to discuss the issue, so I would appreciate an update on the timetable for the rest of the resurfacing. Leading from the A180 to the port of Immingham is the A160 road, linking to all the oil refineries in the area. However, that small section of road is single carriageway and it needs to be dual carriageway. I was told by one truck driver that it is possible to drive from Sicily all the way to north Lincolnshire on motorway or dual carriageway until the point where vehicles come off the A180 on to the A160 and then it is a single carriageway road. Along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) and my hon. Friends the Members for Brigg and Goole (Mr. Cawsey) and for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell), I led a delegation from North Lincolnshire council to meet the Minister's officials and we were told that her officials were looking favourably on getting the A160 dualled. Obviously, as the whole Humber estuary is a global gateway, particularly Immingham, I would certainly appreciate an update from her about the funding for that work. If that work can be completed, it will have a knock-on effect on the town of Immingham itself, because heavy goods vehicles regularly go through the centre of the town at the moment. If we can sort out the transport infrastructure in the area, particularly the roads, that will take such heavy traffic out of the town and that can only be good for Immingham. I would like to talk about the Humber bridge, a subject that was raised earlier by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness. If he cares to go to my website and read the section called ““The River Humber - the curse of the crossing””, I think that he will find out some more facts about the subject. The high cost of getting across the Humber has led to complaints as far back as I could go. In 1316, people were complaining about the halfpenny charge for pedestrians and the one penny charge for equestrians on the Barton to Hull ferry. Daniel Defoe was not terribly fond of crossing the Humber either and referred to it as"““an old fashioned dangerous passage””." He went on to describe"““a ferry over the Humber to Hull in an open boat, in which we had about fifteen horses and ten or twelve cows mingled with about seventeen or eighteen passengers, we were about four hours tossed about in the Humber before we could get into Hull.””" So there have been problems getting across the Humber for quite some time. The story that I really like is that of a bit of a fight about the ferry between Jimmy Acland, who was from Hull, and the Hull Corporation in 1831. Again, that conflict related to the cost of crossing the Humber. The Hull Corporation kept bunging up the charges on the ferry to cross the Humber and Jimmy Acland, who was the editor of the Hull-based Portfolio newspaper, started a campaign against the high ferry charges, to such an extent that he purchased a boat. He called his boat ““The Public Opinion”” and it was up against the Hull Corporation's boat, which was called ““The Royal Charter””. Both boats competed with each other. Jimmy Acland went back in time, as it were, and charged one penny, which was the 1316 charge, for anyone who wanted to cross the Humber. That led to fights between the two boats.