Dams and Bridges

Tweet The logic of putting a new Wales-England link along the top of any barrage as part of a single engineering project seems at first sight to be obvious, as was highlighted in the Western Mail last week. I'm not convinced, however, because the two things are responding to two very different needs; and the arguments surrounding the two are very different.

I am not at all convinced about the building of a barrage across the Severn in the first place, and never have been. (I remember back in the 1970's calling it an idea which didn't hold water. Poor joke, I know, but at least the South Wales Echo used the press release.) The environmental damage done by such a barrage will be significant, and the carbon cost of construction will be enormous. Tidal lagoons, on the other hand, will be far less damaging in environmental terms, and are likely to produce electricity at a cheaper unit cost, even if the total amount of electricity produced might be lower.

So I hope that no barrage will ever be built - which is why creating a dependency between such a barrage and a new crossing looks like a major mistake to me.

I am not convinced of the need for a new road link across the Severn estuary either, but I am absolutely convinced of the need for a new rail link. The Severn Tunnel is expensive to maintain, and the near continuous maintenance works make it a bottleneck on the rail network, frequently causing delays and diversions. And as long as the rail link eastwards from South Wales depends on the Tunnel, our capital city will never be linked into the European high speed rail network. The tunnel needs to be replaced, and we should be planning for that now.

Continental Europe is surging ahead with a modern high speed rail network. Plans exist to link the continent from North to South and from East to West with new additions to the high speed lines. Whilst the rest of Europe has spent the last 30 years investing in rail, the UK has been fragmenting and privatising the railways in the name of right wing dogma; and instead of being used to fund investment, UK government subsidies to the rail industry have effectively gone into paying dividends to shareholders.

There are plans in existence stretching to at least 2020 for investment and expansion on the continent, and in the UK, we have... well, no plans at all to expand high speed rail beyond the link from London to the Channel Tunnel, just vague, empty discussions. We need to bring the railway network fully back under public control, and we need an imaginative and bold plan to extend the high speed network across the UK. A new rail crossing of the Severn has to form part of that.

As far as Wales is concerned, the high speed network certainly needs to reach the ferry ports – and why not plan for a north-south link as well? Expensive – certainly, and tremendously so. It will take many years to bring to fruition. Our European neighbours have all recognised the advantages, and have had the imagination and courage to make that infrastructure investment, but we are already 30 years late and haven't even started.

Against that background, linking the future of South Wales rail links to the barrage creates an unnecessary dependency, and is just a recipe for further prevarication.