Former Berwick MP Anne Marie Trevelyan has claimed civil servants “hated” the proposed scheme to dual the A1 and frustrated attempts to get the project done. Trevelyan served as the area’s MP from 2015 until 2024, with dualling the road a key point of her election campaigns.
She also briefly served as Secretary of State for Transport in the ill-fated Liz Truss Government. The Conservative administration did give the green light to the scheme under Rishi Sunak, but the decision was reversed by Labour following the general election.
The timing of the approval was criticised, coming after numerous delays with the Tories well behind in the polls and with the election already called. But speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service Trevelyan, who lost her seat to Labour in 2024, insisted she and others had fought hard for the improvements.
She said:
“They hated it because it didn’t meet the budget models that any road down south did. It was always hard work.
“The whole point of everything we were trying to do was move investment north. We made progress and we had a team built who were going to work on this, but the process was slow and then Covid hit and everyone stopped work for 18 months – or that is what it felt like, because they were on emergency work.
“The system was going to slow it down. We ended up spending over £60 million on all the prep work.
“Everybody was lined up waiting for the final stage to go, and Rishi pulled the plug and called an election. The project was sitting there waiting to go, but Labour came in and scrapped it.”
The scheme
The scheme would have seen 13 miles of the road between Morpeth and Ellingham made into a dual carriageway. This would just have left the final stretch between Ellingham and the Scottish Border as a single carriageway.
The government has said the project was “unfunded” and unaffordable given the financial situation it inherited from the Tories. Even recent changes to the so-called Green Book test that strengthened the case for infrastructure investment outside of the south east would reportedly not have tipped the scales in the project’s favour.
Trevelyan continued: “They could have taken this as a Labour win, but they presumably took the advice of civil servants who would always rather spend money in the south.
“They just took the advice of officials, and officials who had consistently not liked the project. This was about redistributing road investment away from the south east.
“The North also deserves proper road infrastructure. It was hard – levelling up was hard, we were fighting a system. The civil service simply didn’t want to do it.
“It’s not that they’re bad people. It’s that the frameworks that they work to continue to deliver that outcome.
“It’s a political choice. They have to change the framework that the departments work to.
“Economic development has to be rated more highly than value for money. If you build it, they will come.
“That’s difficult for the machine to do. We can do that if we want to, we could get a mandate that says value for money is more than cash terms.
“I tried and failed on this, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep trying. Otherwise, the north remains the poor relation.”
A case for dualling
Calls to reopen the case for dualling have reignited in recent weeks following a string of tragic accidents on the road that saw six people killed in little over a month. Local leaders from across the political divide have called on the government to reconsider the case.
Trevelyan added: “There have been some horrible accidents in all the usual places. It is ridiculous, it’s terrifying.
“I’m used to it, I know the worst bits and I slow down. I would never overtake north of Morpeth, it’s just not worth it.”
Responding to Trevelyan’s comments, a spokesperson for the Department for Transport said: “Given the challenging financial picture we inherited, we have had to make difficult decisions on a number of road projects the previous government failed to fund.
“National Highways is actively working on solutions for this stretch of the A1 that could improve safety and congestion as part of the third Road Investment Strategy.”
Safety improvements are set to be carried out on the route as part of the third Road Investment strategy, which runs from 2026 until 2031. Further details of this scheme have yet to be revealed.
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