Today I met with officials from Highways England in Parliament, with Colchester MP Will Quince, to obtain clarification on the recent announcement that work to upgrade the A12 would be delayed. They confirmed to me that the improvements relate to trebling the A12 from Chelmsford to the A120 junction at Marks Tey. This work will now commence in approximately July 2020 rather than March 2020 as hoped, although the delay could be up to six months in total. This is obviously disappointing, given the importance of the A12 to the whole East Anglian economy. However, the officials did confirm that the work would definitely still go ahead and that, should work on other projects in the area be announced for the coming years (e.g. at Copdock) it did not definitively follow that such works would be subject to greater delays than otherwise because of this specific delay.
Given the terribly dangerous state of A12 junctions in South Suffolk, e.g. Four Sisters, I once again plugged the need for HE to consider those junctions within specific safety allocations rather than in terms of the broader much longer-term schemes context. Overall, not ideal news but one must hope that the delay will be minimal and that this very significant upgrade will still go ahead. Certainly, Suffolk and Essex MPs will continue to campaign for better infrastructure.