Strong Rumours! Northumberland County Council to seek 500 week road closure to turn Cowpen Road into a back lane similar to their sections of the A1?

 

Following on from having a commercial street, Bowes Street in Northumberland’s largest Town, Blyth, closed for more than a year almost killing off trade in order to remove some planters and mark out some short term parking bays it seems this Tory led County Council and its ‘levelling up for corporate profit’ Government is at it again.

The news that the dualling of a short stretch of the A1 promised by the former Conservative Transport Minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan for the last three general elections, has been put back for the fifth time over the last twelve years of a Tory Government in power.

Despite the planned regeneration and modernisation of this stretch of highway being 25Ml short of the Town the former Transport Ministers constituency is centred in, Berwick upon Tweed, the modernisation of this, the longest ‘back lane’ in the UK will still dog the economy of North Northumberland and its Borderlands neighbours until a change of Government settles into place and the need to join the nations of England and Scotland by road up the eastern side of Country is seen as a positive.

Its strongly rumoured by residents of the Town of Blyth that the County Council, famous for investigations, bullying, toxic decision making and secrecy of the first order virtually operating its own official secrets act has decided at one or other of its secret cabinet meetings to apply for a 500 week road closure notice for its busiest highway, Cowpen Road using their Bowes Street experience as a marker.

Taking the County Councils own blurb from its published application to the Highways Agency for cash to develop a bypass for Cowpen Road as base data, 20,000 vehicles a day pass in and out of the Town via this highway. Local have informed us that the disruption caused by high speed broadband cabling and a twenty week dig by Northern Gas Networks will pale into insignificance when the County Council’s slow mo machine begins to narrow the highway by a third and build a cycle lane of motorway proportions for a couple of hundred users a week! 

We here at Murky need to know if these rumours have any truth in them and if they do, how the County Council will insure and compensate its residents from massively increased pollution when more traffic sits at a standstill as it removes right turn zones from the highways to facilitate and appease its Tory Councillors who need to be seen being green anywhere as long as it's not in Morpeth and most of whom rarely if ever visit Blyth.