The Welsh Government has confirmed works on the A465 Heads of the Valleys road will finish this summer, 23 years after they started.
The £1.4bn publicly-funded project to transform the road connecting Swansea with Monmouthshire into a full dual carriageway began in 2002.
When completed later this year, the A465 (Hirwaun to Dowlais) project will have delivered 17.7km of new dual carriageway, 6.1km of sideroads, more than 14km of active travel routes, 38 new culverts (a structure that channels water past an obstacle), 30 new bridges and 28 retaining walls.
Contractors involved in the project include the Future Valleys consortium – comprising FCC, Roadbridge, Meridiam, Alun Griffiths and Atkins – which is building sections 5 and 6 of the road between Dowlais Top, Merthyr Tydfl and Hirwain.
‘A complex project’
The Welsh Government said the road will improve accessibility, reduce journey times, provide extra resilience and reliability, and enhance road safety.
It added that the project benefited the regional economy by creating more than 2,000 new jobs, of which half went to people living in the local area, spending more than £200m in the Valleys supply chain, and employing 158 apprentices with just under half from the valley’s region.
It has also relocated wildlife and planted more than 55,000 trees to mitigate the construction’s environmental impact, with a total of 120,000 expected to be planted by the end of the programme.
Cabinet secretary for transport and North Wales, Ken Skates, said: “This project is an incredibly impressive piece of engineering and a fantastic example of how targeted investment in road infrastructure can deliver on many levels […] It’s been a complex project which has not been without its challenges, and I would like to thank everyone who has played their part in helping us to deliver one of the largest road projects in the UK.”
Tony Gibbons, owner of civil engineering company Atlas Groundworks, said: “[The project] has allowed us to upscale our operations and further strengthen our reputation in the construction industry. As a result of this, we’ve been able to create new job opportunities for local people and enhance our skills so that we can expand our business services.”
There simply isn’t enough whitewash in Wales to do justice to this, though this article tries hard. The last phase of the dualling of the A465 from Llandarcy to Abergavenny has, like its immediate predecessors – between Dowlais Top and Abergavenny – left knowledgeable spectators open-mouthed at the criminal waste of public monies from project inception, through design and being on site, to – perhaps – completion one day. Which is certainly nowhere near yet. What was needed was another lane and a central barrier on an already three lane road, with some grade separation in places. What we got – and the first section of dual carriageway was built in the 1970’s – over fifty years ago – was a dragged-out piece of unwelcome and unnecessary megalomania that has planet-smashed its way across Wales, decade after decade. A dual carriageway with 70mph+ design parameters – it’s better aligned than most UK motorways in much more challenging terrain – and yet with a lower speed limit in places than the road it replaced. And five decades plus to deliver it at fifty times the cost of an eighteen month contract for an extra lane. Well. The Assembly can be proud of that. I doubt if many others will be. The original road might have been outdated a decade after it was built 1960-3, but it only took three years for the whole length.