Where are the next big road schemes for the East of England?
What are the schemes under consideration?
Norwich Western Link: A 3.9 mile road between the A47 and Broadland Northway. This would complete an outer ring road around the city and ease congestion in the suburbs. The controversial £270m project was paused earlier this year after Norfolk County Council was unable to resolve objections by Natural England, which raised concerns about the impact on a local bat colony. The authority recently agreed to look again at the schemePullover junction, Kings Lynn: Improving the A17/A47 junction would ease congestion. Previous suggestions have included upgrading the roundabout or building a flyover. Norfolk County Council stopped pursuing the idea last year after it was concerned the benefit-to-cost ratio was too low to attract government fundingA10 Ely - Cambridge: Junction improvements and making the entire stretch a dual two-lane carriageway. Cambridgeshire County Council and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoral authority have worked together on the project, but have recently been looking for ways to reduce its costA1139 Peterborough: New slip roads from Fletton Parkway to facilitate access to the new universityA10 Broxbourne: Junction improvementsA127 Basildon to M25: Various improvements are planned to both the road and to encourage greater use of public transport. Parts of the project have already received money from Essex County Council, the local enterprise partnership and Department for TransportA13 Grays: Remodelling of the A126/A13 junctionVauxhall Way, Luton: Dualling the road would increase capacity and improve journey times to the nearby airport. There would also be provision to encourage more use of cycling and public transportA509 Isham bypass: A proposed dual carriageway around the village to improve the capacity of A509 and improve links to the A14A43 Northampton-Kettering: The first two stages of dualling between the A45 and A14 have already taken place. West Northamptonshire Council is looking for funding for the third stage.
There is no guarantee that these schemes will eventually receive government funding, as that will depend on their business case and whether councils can demonstrate that there will be a significant economic return for the cost of construction. Schemes that can draw in funding from other sources may also stand a better chance.Yet these will be the main projects that local councils, MPs and business and transport groups will be working on and lobbying the government for over the next few years.Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said projects that would help generate economic growth and open up land for housing will be at the forefront for consideration.
Which road schemes were not approved?
The transport secretary has decided not to fund widening works to the A12 between Colchester and Marks Tey, Essex, telling MPs that the £1.2bn project was too expensive."Only projects that are fully costed, affordable and deliver a return on taxpayers' money will be given the green light under my watch," she told MPs.She also dropped a proposed upgrade of the A47 at Wansford near Peterborough. She said: "We are already investing over £500m on improvements to the A47 corridor [in Norfolk]. "It is just not feasible to support further investment at this time."Both decisions have been criticised by local business groups and the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce accused Alexander of "a significant strategic blunder". Neither scheme has made it onto the department's "under consideration" list. MPs have pointed out that the East of England has recently received money for Sizewell C, the Lower Thames Crossing and East West Rail. The new list suggests that there could be other big road projects in the east in line for funding if the region can make the case for them.
Follow East of England news on X, Instagram and Facebook: BBC Beds, Herts & Bucks, BBC Cambridgeshire, BBC Essex, BBC Norfolk, BBC Northamptonshire or BBC Suffolk.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I've £90k in student debt – for what?' Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout
Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having applied to more than 700 jobs. 'I assumed it wouldn't be too hard to find a job [with three higher education qualifications],' she said. 'However, I often spent a whole day applying for a job, tailoring my CV and cover letter, only to be rejected two minutes later with a comment saying my documents had been 'carefully reviewed'. About 70% of jobs I didn't hear back from at all, including some I had attended multiple rounds of interviews for.' AI, Susie felt, had changed the graduate jobs landscape she experienced in one way in particular. 'Thousands of people are applying to the same jobs now – on LinkedIn you can see the number of people who have pressed apply and often one hour after a job is posted hundreds of people have already [applied].' In the end, Susie was offered a position paying under £30k, 'which isn't that much more than a PhD stipend after paying tax'. Her struggles in securing her first graduate role will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK who have been navigating one of the toughest labour markets in recent history. As employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, the number of entry-level jobs has reduced sharply since the advent of ChatGPT. As large graduate cohorts apply for increasingly scarce early career positions, the heavy use of AI in the recruitment process itself has made the job hunt nightmarish and Kafkaesque for university leavers across the country. Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master's degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May. 'I've applied to about 150 entry-level jobs – in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions,' she said. 'So far I've had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream. 'Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they're looking for. It feels dystopian.' One of the few responses she has received so far was a rejection email explaining that 2,000 other people had applied for the role. 'I feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to,' Martyna said. 'Both of my degrees seem useless. My parents came here from Poland, and I have £90,000 in student debt – for what? 'They told us: 'If you don't go to university, you could be working in McDonald's.' I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience. I have considered going back to Poland.' Various people who shared their frustrations said that, across a variety of sectors, job-specific experience, especially in customer-facing roles, was now valued a lot more by employers than an impressive degree. 'Jobs don't care if you have a degree,' said Lucy, a 24-year-old from Lincolnshire who has been working part-time in support roles and at [the bakery chain] Greggs since graduating in 2022. 'I have a degree in visual communication and can't get hired in the design industry, but my experience working in a college means I pretty much always get interviews for education-related roles. I'm frustrated that I essentially got a degree because I was told it was the only good option and now I'm finding that I would have been better off entering the workforce straight out of college.' Lucy has just accepted a new full-time role on minimum wage in the residential care sector. 'It's the best I could get,' she said. Willemien Schurer, 53, a mother from London whose two sons have recently graduated, was among a number of respondents who explained that jobseekers felt entirely unable to stand out, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of other applicants had almost identical CVs, and had likely produced very similar cover letters with the help of AI. '[I've read in the news] that recruiters are bemoaning that so many applications fit the bill so precisely that they don't know how to filter them,' Schurer said. 'If everyone ticks all the boxes, then how to discern whom to pick? Grade inflation [at school and university] has now followed people into the job market.' Her older son, she said, had spent a 'soul-destroying' five months applying for about 200 jobs unsuccessfully after he graduated with a maths degree from a top university. AI recruitment processes that make it nigh impossible for candidates to distinguish themselves from competitors without being screened out, Schurer felt, have placed an additional premium on personal connections. 'It appears that it's back to who you know rather than what you know, and a whole load of luck,' she said, reflecting the concerns of various respondents. 'AI-generated resumes screened by AI HR software means [one's success] is so much more dependent on networks and who you know,' agreed a business school professor from Sweden who wanted to stay anonymous. 'But gen Z know fewer people in real life and depend on digital connections, which is not optimal.' The job market his students were graduating into was 'tough, and about to get tougher', he predicted. 'While companies are using AI to reduce costs, students are using it for all uni work and to replace thinking, and are subsequently de-optimising themselves for future jobs.' This sentiment was echoed by dozens of university lecturers from the UK and elsewhere, with many expressing grave concerns about the impact of AI on the university experience, warning that students were graduating without having acquired skills and knowledge they would have in the past because they were using AI to complete most coursework. 'Being able to write well and think coherently were basic requirements in most graduate jobs 10, 15 years ago,' said a senior recruitment professional at a large consultancy firm from London, speaking anonymously. 'Now, they are emerging as basically elite skills. Almost nobody can do it. We see all the time that people with top degrees cannot summarise the contents of a document, cannot problem solve. 'Coupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports.' Various employers and professionals in HR and management positions shared that university leavers they encountered often struggled to speak on the phone or in meetings, take notes with a pen, relay messages precisely or complete written tasks without internet access. 'What people want to do and what they're actually good at are simply often two very different things, and it feels as if schools and universities could be doing a much better job at communicating this,' said Tom, the CEO of an e-commerce logistics company in the south-east of England. 'But sadly, universities are now run like businesses. They sell dreams and young people buy them, and then often, when they re-emerge into the real world, it becomes a nightmare.' Sanjay Balle, 26, from London, graduated from the Open University with a third-class PPE degree last summer and has been earning £700-£800 a month as a waiter on a zero-hours contract since. 'I've been applying for about 20 entry-level and graduate roles a day and have racked up well over 500 applications – in advertising, healthcare, procurement, education, financial services and the civil service,' he said. Given the AI revolution in the job market, helping employers cut costs and improve productivity, Balle suggested it was 'no-brainer' that there are now fewer entry-level roles, and while people might look to the government to incentivise hiring, the huge cost made such an intervention unlikely. 'I think we need to encourage young people to explore other options apart from university, to pursue vocational paths and go into trades, but we also need to help university graduates like me. Otherwise, more and more graduates that are overqualified for their part-time jobs [will experience] a lack of social interaction and mental health issues.' While most graduate jobseekers who got in touch were desperate to secure any full-time job, several expressed profound disappointment about the creeping realisation that they may struggle finding work in their chosen speciality. 'My biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in,' said Louise, 24, who graduated from the University of Oxford with a master's in microbiology last year and applied to hundreds of jobs while working part-time at John Lewis before she was recently offered a graduate trainee position. 'There are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees who also apply, making them less entry-level,' she said. The employer that hired her, Louise added, had been more interested in whether she had customer service skills acquired in hospitality jobs than in her scientific work experience and qualifications. 'The job I've been offered is not using the skills I have,' she said. 'I just want to use my degree.'
The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Scamazon' – how fake emails are targeting Prime subscribers
As a frequent Amazon shopper you pay £95 for an annual Prime subscription, so when an email arrives warning the price is going up you are quick to react. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. But the email, which includes a button to click on to 'cancel' the subscription, is a scam and sent by fraudsters trying to steal your account login and payment details. After a recent surge in customers reporting fake messages, Amazon emailed its more than 200 million Prime members globally to warn them. The company took this step to ensure 'scammers are not using our brand to take advantage of people who trust us' and 'educate consumers to avoid impersonation scams'. The fake emails claim your Amazon Prime subscription will automatically renew at an unexpected price (in the UK the service costs £95 a year or £8.99 a month). The messages sometimes include personal information gleaned from other sources in an attempt to appear legitimate. They may also include a 'cancel subscription' button that clicks through to a fake Amazon login page. This is not the only tactic being used to prey on Amazon shoppers. Earlier this year, the retailer warned of a 'striking' increase in phone-based impersonation scams in the UK. It also said that fraudsters were responding to customer complaints on social media using counterfeit profiles. They urge you to act quickly to make a payment. When you click through you will be asked for personal and payment details. Do not click on any links in these messages. The scammers are trying to steal your login and other sensitive personal information. You can just ignore the email or forward it on to As the scams happen away from its platform, the more consumers report them, the better Amazon's systems become at identifying those responsible. Last year, it got more than 55,000 phishing websites and 12,000 phone numbers shutdown. Amazon says: 'We encourage consumers to report suspected scams to us, so that we can protect their accounts and refer bad actors to law enforcement.' If you are keen to check the status of your Prime membership, open the Amazon mobile app, or go directly to Select 'Prime' from the main menu to view your membership status, renewal dates, and plan details. To check if a message is really from Amazon visit the 'message centre' under the 'your account' tab. Legitimate messages will appear there. If you clicked on a suspicious link, monitor your credit or debit card statements for unfamiliar charges, and contact your bank immediately about unauthorised transactions. To avoid falling victim to a scam, Amazon advises customers to use its apps, or type in the browser (you could bookmark this link). Remember the company will never request sensitive information outside the website or app. Also consider enabling two-step verification for extra security. You can do this via your account's 'login & security settings' or at Once you've activated this feature every time you log in you will be sent a code to input alongside your password. Another option is to enable Passkey to use your face, fingerprint, or the PIN that you use to unlock your device, to sign into your account.
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Hope Newark A46 upgrades will fix 'bottleneck bypass'
Major upgrades to the A46 in Newark have been discussed for years – and this week they got one step closer to Mandy Brunning, the project to dual the A46 between Farndon and Winthorpe will make a "huge difference".She works at Polly's Kitchen in the town and said she has stopped driving to work in favour of the bus because of gridlock traffic in and out of the Nottinghamshire town."There are traffic jams every day, it's horrendous. Most days it is a nightmare to get in and out of Newark," she said. The government confirmed this week it would fund upgrades to the road as part of a £92bn project to fund transport schemes across the for the A46 project have soared in recent years – the £500m originally earmarked for the project rose to £686.4m last Highways said about 16,000 vehicles pass along the section of the A46 each project also includes a new flyover at the Cattle Market junction, a new bridge over the A1 and the widening of roundabouts at Farndon and Winthorpe. Labour's Nottingham South MP and transport minister Lilian Greenwood said the government would fund the entire project."We're committed to funding the project and we recognise that the cost of lots of projects announced a long time ago have gone up," she said."Clearly it's an expensive project but it is something that we know is much needed."People can have confidence that they are going to see this road improved." Mandy questioned whether the plans might be too little, too late for said: "There are an awful lot of businesses closing and a lot of people are shopping out of town because it's easier to go to a retail park."A lot of the businesses have already gone, so my concern is that it's too late to preserve Newark."The scheme doesn't yet have planning permission, which Newark East county councillor Sam Smith, leader of the Conservative group on Nottinghamshire County Council, said was a added: "It's absolutely fantastic news and something we've been fighting for. "We should have had shovels in the ground last year but it will be great for Newark."I'm slightly concerned about the planning aspect of it. "Councillors need to come together and do it for the residents to make life here better." 'Peace of mind' Paul Smith, chair of Winthorpe with Langford Parish Council, said the news was positive for the area but raised concerns about the construction was formerly part of the 'Think Again' campaign in the village."We are a cul-de-sac village so anything that impacts our access is going to impact us and we are concerned about that," he said."Our biggest concern is around what the impacts of construction will be around businesses, schools and people getting in and out of Winthorpe."We are in support of it but we want the minimum amount of impact on our community."If it does go ahead then we're in for three and a half years of hardship."
