Shrewsbury North West Relief Road: Officials to meet over business case for long-awaited project
Highways bosses will meet with Government officials on Monday to kick-start work on a business case for Shrewsbury's North West Relief Road.
Preliminary work has already started on the proposal for the bypass, and officials will head to London for talks with Government figures to push the project forward.
About £950,000 of funding was secured from central government late last year to fund a refresh of historical data and information about the plans for the road, which could cost up to £120 million to build.
Shropshire Council match funded £50,000 towards the project.
Matt Johnson, strategic transport and contracts manager for Shropshire Council, said: "It has been a long-standing ambition to deliver this project.
"At the end of last year there was a chance to bid into Department for Transport funding. We put in a bid which was to cover the costs of refreshing historical information from a previous business case such as vehicle movements and expected increases in traffic and bring it to a present day scenario.
"Between now and December is to get that refresh under way and done. There is no suggestion we are going to be able to go away and build the road. This is an enormous engineering scheme.
"This is a desktop exercise and is not the start of an enormous consultation on if it should go ahead.
"We are currently at ground zero and we have got to make the case."
Mr Johnson said the meeting with the Department for Transport would agree key dates and he hoped the major work to develop the business case would be under way by April 1.
He said: "In December that work will then go back to the Department for Transport who will sit as judge and jury.
"We will bring a conclusion and they will challenge that. What happens beyond that we can't second guess but transport is a big issue and is a big push for Government.
"We have got questions we will ask on Monday and they have their guidance which we will follow.
"It is an open conversation and we will agree between us exactly what we both want."
The funding was awarded through Marches Local Enterprise Partnership and covers the 2017/18 financial year.
The NWRR has been on the cards for decades and the previous plan was dropped in 2011.
It would complete Shrewsbury's strategic road network by providing the fourth and final arc of the Shrewsbury bypass, linking Battlefield to Oxon.
It has been previously suggested that the road would cut journey times between the west and the north of Shrewsbury by about two thirds – from 19.1 minutes to 6.6 minutes.
