A1 vital in supporting country’s economic ‘spine’

14 December 2023

With a network of Eddisons offices feeding into the A1 & A1(M), Lincoln director William Wall supports all calls for improvements & upgrades to this historic road.

There can’t be a business concern in the East Midlands region that won’t be supporting Transport for the East Midland’s (TfEM) recent call for improvements to the A1.

It’s a road that supports England’s commercial spine and its log jams at various points north & south do nothing to help, in particular, the warehouse & logistics sector on whom we all depend more and more in our modern, daily lives.

Delays, repairs, and payment confusion

The TfEM report in which among 100 businesses across a range of sectors were surveyed, makes reference to the literal cost of repairs due to the A1’s parlous conditions in places. But there is a wider cost to businesses beyond that of a garage repair bill.

According to the TfEM survey, ‘Nearly all […] have adjusted their operations, planning alternative routes […] conducting risk assessments to accommodate the road’s challenging conditions’.

Time is money for all businesses. But it is more acutely measurable in the warehouse & logistics sector whose ‘just in time’ supply chain profit model depends on a functioning road system.

There are significant pockets of A1 that do work. For instance, the A1(M) connecting the A14 and Peterborough through Alconbury Weald serves this area well. The modernising of the A14/A1 corridor in this area has been crucial to the expansion and prosperity of Peterborough, Huntingdon and Northampton through ‘big shed’ developments.

However, the luxury of four lanes and a hard shoulder soon bottlenecks on the outskirts of Peterborough through to north of Stamford.

More positively, there are plans afoot to sort the A1 interchange at Newark. The proposed £500 million upgrade scheme, announced in November, sees the A1/A46/A17 interchange and northern ring road at Newark are both to be significantly upgraded.

As we commented in the autumn, this will notably reduce congestion and travel times between the Humber Ports/Lincolnshire and the wider region.

Indeed, two of our logistics instructions – new developments at St Modwen Park in Lincoln and Overfield Park, Newark, are in prime positions to benefit directly from this particular A1 upgrade.

The Romans, in carving out the A1, from Londinium to as far as the Picts would permit, left us with a great commercial template that has served adjacent regions well down the millennia.

As a road we need daily, we want to be confident of the A1’s ongoing importance in each region it touches because of it, not in spite of it.

Those of us in areas of the country where improvements have been announced are cheered by the news. However, we join the call of commercial operators and their property advisers that these regions can only continue to benefit from economic prosperity in looking to an upgraded, modern A1 serving 21^st Century needs sooner rather than later.

William Wall is the director of Eddisons’ Lincoln office, where they specialise in building and cost consultancy as well as development and investment consultancy.