LATER this year the upgrade of the A1 between Leeming and Barton to motorway standard will be completed.
Costing £380m, it will be one of the finest stretches of highway in the UK and represents a tremendous investment in the Richmond constituency.
It will carry up to 70,000 vehicles a day and, thanks to the recently completed Aiskew, Leeming and Bedale bypass, motorists will be only 20 minutes’ drive from the glories of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Just half an hour’s drive could take them to the equally beautiful North York Moors National Park. But sadly many drivers will remain ignorant of the proximity of these wonderful landscapes because of the current policy on erecting signs on what’s known as the strategic road network.
The rules on what can and cannot be signposted from a motorway are very restrictive, as I have discovered during my campaign to have brown tourism signs for Wensleydale, Swaledale and Richmond at the new A1 junctions.
With the support of the county and district councils, I have succeeded in getting signs for Wensleydale at Leeming Bar, but I am still lobbying ministers so Richmond and Swaledale can benefit by having similar signs at the new Scotch Corner junction.
This issue of signposting tourism attractions from the motorway network has cropped up at recent meetings of the Parliamentary watchdog committee I serve on.
The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee is conducting an inquiry into rural tourism and last week I had the opportunity to ask the head of the Peak District National Park, Sarah Fowler (who was also representing all the other UK national parks), what she thought of the current Highways England policy which specifically rules that our national parks should be not be signposted from our main roads.
Not much was her reply and she further pointed out that in Scotland both the Loch Lomond and Cairngorms national parks are extensively signposted. Highways England could do a lot better she felt in helping to make these world-renowned landscapes less invisible to visitors travelling around the UK.
I am hopeful that my select committee’s final report will urge the Government to look again at the tourism signs policy. Clearly, too many signs are a danger but the current restrictions are not helping the great British countryside to grow its important tourism industry.
Last week I had a stimulating get-together with a group of carers at the local office of the Alzheimer’s Society in Northallerton.
The group, who all look after parents or partners/spouses with varying forms and degrees of dementia, gave me a valuable insight into the challenges of being a carer and what could be done to make their lives and their loved one’s lives easier.
Given the £132bn estimate of the yearly value of carers’ contributions, I think carers need all the help we can give them. Some things seem simple to fix – like standardising drugs packaging to avoid confusion for dementia sufferers – others less so, but I’ll be feeding all the carers’ views back to my colleagues and ministers at Westminster.
Information on the help that is available is critical and I was interested to hear of a regular carers group meeting in the upstairs cafe at Barkers Northallerton on the second Monday in the month. It’s informal but call 01609-780872 if you or a carer you know would like to attend.