Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2024
I thank the member for bringing the debate to the chamber, as I have four major north-to-south roads in my rural constituency of Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale: the A68, the A7, the A701 and the A702. If I may, Deputy Presiding Officer, I will confine myself to speaking about those roads. As members can imagine, over my many years in Parliament, I have become very familiar with them, as I am with lesser highways and byways, too.
I say to Douglas Lumsden that there is no war on the rural Borders and Midlothian—it was the Scottish Government that built the Borders railway, but I digress.
First, I will deal with the ubiquitous potholes. My experience of those is probably more frequent as the roads that I have mentioned approach Edinburgh, although there is a particularly bad stretch on the Auchendinny road that avoids Penicuik, which is a bit of a rat run. Potholes are not only down to the use of private vehicles; they are undoubtedly caused by heavy commercial vehicles. Those vehicles knock the stuffing out of our narrow rural roads, and not simply the surface, but often more so the road edges, because those roads came about to serve horses and carts and were not built for loaded articulated lorries.
I have spoken before about vehicle excise duty, which was once called road tax, but which has long since simply gone into the United Kingdom tax pot. In the budget of 1909, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that the roads system would be self-financing, and so from 1910, the proceeds from road vehicle excise duties were dedicated to funding the building and maintenance of the roads system. Even during that period, however, the majority of the cost of road building and improvement came from general and local taxation, owing to the tax take being too low for the upkeep of the roads.
Hypothecation came to an end in 1937, and the proceeds of the vehicle road taxes were subsequently paid directly into the Exchequer. The road fund itself, which was then funded by Government grants, was not abolished until 1955. The fund has long since gone, but my question is, should it be resurrected?
A recent RAC survey of potholes across the UK estimated that there are at least 1 million potholes UK-wide, yet in 2022-23, the UK Government collected £7.3 billion in vehicle excise duty. As I said, that money is simply swallowed up by the Treasury.
Would it not be fairer if Scotland, and indeed England, collected its own road tax and then used it appropriately by ring fencing it? Some of the money could provide Scotland with £700 million per annum, not simply to plug potholes but to assist in maintaining and modernising the network. That is just a thought.
With regard to road improvements, I appreciate that there are pressures on budgets at both governmental and council level, but what would certainly help on rural roads in my constituency, especially on dark mornings and evenings, would be better road markings. We need central reflectors and white lines not just down the centre of the roads but at the edges, because some of the roads in my constituency outwith the towns and villages can be a very tough drive on a dark night, especially when it is raining.
I am also pleased that staggered speed limits have been introduced, for example when entering and leaving Stow. Extending the 20mph limit, before raising the limit to 40mph to a place called Galabank, and then to 60mph, has helped a great deal with safety on the roads. That has now been extended to Eddleston. I am now campaigning to have the same approach on the A702, which would be to extend the 40mph limit northwards from Dolphinton, at least to what is known as the Garvald junction, because that is a particularly fast and dangerous stretch.
I note the dreadful statistics on road deaths, but roads are not the real culprit. Just because the speed limit is 60mph, it does not mean that you do that speed while going around sharp bends when, in any event, you might come across some of the many cyclists on the Borders roads. There are other issues with city drivers, who may be unaware of the specific challenges of such roads, such as stray farm animals, wildlife and slow-moving farm vehicles, for starters.
Those are just some of my observations on the problems and challenges of rural roads, but I would like us to look again at whether at least some of the vehicle excise duty could be apportioned to Scotland’s roads, and indeed to England’s roads.
18:11