What the cost has been to date of the preparation of schemes to dual the A1 between Morpeth and Felton and at Mousen, near Belford.

To date, £4.26 million has been spent on preparation costs for the A1 Morpeth to Felton scheme, and £1.23 million has been spent on preparation costs for the A1 Adderstone to Belford scheme.

That is more than £5 million. Now that the Prime Minister has said that he wishes that the A1 was dualled and all the regional bodies have said that it is a strategic national road, surely that money should not be wasted, but used as the basis for those limited improvement schemes to be introduced much sooner than now looks possible.

I naturally noticed the Prime Minister's interest in the scheme, but one of the things about my job is that I often have to say no to very important people. The simple fact of the matter, as the Prime Minister pointed out, is that we have to set priorities. There is not a huge amount of money available to fund every possible scheme. We asked the local people in the region for their advice on the scheme, which was that it should not be a priority and that we should stop moving forward with it.

Will my hon. Friend look again at the answer that he has just given? If he does, he will find that the region did not say that the dualling of the A1 was not a priority. It said that any funds for that scheme would eat up all the funds available for the rest of the transport systems in the region. Therefore, it is not that the scheme is not a priority; it is just that there are insufficient funds for it.

The simple fact of the matter is that we identified a sum of money that it was reasonable to spend in each region of the country and we asked the regions to prioritise that. My hon. Friend knows perfectly well that the region came up with other priorities, including many that he has supported and which are moving ahead on a faster time scale than the dualling of the A1. We have asked the region to look at its priorities again in two years. If it has got things wrong, it can prioritise the dualling of the A1 over some of the other schemes, but I suspect that my hon. Friend will be back complaining about that, because it will mean that some of the schemes that he supports will sink down the priority list.

Will the Minister admit that that is a totally unjustified attack on the regional transport board, which was given a paltry £547 million for all transport—rail, buses and roads—in the north-east over the next 10 years? It had to work within that constraint when fixing its priorities. Does the Minister accept that the only way that important schemes such as the A1 western bypass could go ahead is through the introduction of road charging, which would be hugely unpopular in the region?

That is the first time that I have ever heard the words "£547 million" and "paltry" in the same sentence. It seems like a large sum of money to me. The simple fact is that funding was allocated to each region using exactly the same formula. Every region faced the same problems and difficulties in prioritising its schemes. The region took the view that the scheme in question should not become a priority until 2016 and that other schemes should be moved forward first. We have taken the advice of the region because we believe in devolution and listening to local people.