POSTPONEMENT of the planned works to upgrade the A1 from Dishforth to Scotch Corner is bad news indeed for the economy of the North-East and North Yorkshire.

The inadequacies of the present dual carriageway with its myriad crossings and sub-standard junctions have been well-chronicled but are worth repeating. Increasing congestion at the point where the three-lane motorway becomes two at Dishforth is just one aspect of the road's failings. From a safety aspect the road is dire. The mix of lorries and cars with farm traffic is particularly lethal. Inevitably more lives will be lost.

The situation is similar at Longnewton on the A66 between Darlington and Stockton. This is a much smaller scheme but the proposal to improve the junction and a key access route to the fast developing Durham Tees Valley Airport is just as important, perhaps more so, from a safety point of view.

What is additionally disappointing is the way the decision to delay these schemes has been passed to the wider world. If it hadn't been for a concerned parish councillor in Rainton, one of the North Yorkshire communities with a keen interest in the A1 upgrade, passing on the information to the Darlington & Stockton Times, it would have been some considerable time before the implications of the 2004 spending settlement were laid bare. Not so much a case of burying bad news but strangling it at birth.

We can understand why Governments will not want to make a bally-hoo about unpopular decisions but to quietly put a scheme as important as the upgrade of the A1 on the back burner and only tell people about it when pressed is shameful. At least the last Conservative Government, when announcing it was scrapping the upgrade proposals back in 1996, had the honesty to make a statement explaining the reasoning behind the decision. In this case, the people of North Yorkshire and the North-East are just guessing.