A465 Heads of the Valleys road fully reopens after 23 years

It’s been called the “road from hell” but after 23 years of roadworks and congestion, one of the UK’s most expensive and complex road upgrade projects is finally complete.

The last traffic cone and contraflow was removed from the A465 Heads of the Valleys road in south Wales on Friday night after a £2bn upgrade that started back in 2002.

The 28-mile (45km) improvement is designed to bring prosperity to one of the UK’s most deprived areas and cut journey times between west Wales and the Midlands.

Welsh ministers said the upgrade would boost the region but opponents have criticised how long it has taken and the “extortionate” price tag.

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative UK government initially drew up the upgrade programme in 1990 because of frequent tailbacks and serious crashes on parts of the route.

Work to turn the road into a full dual carriageway began when Tony Blair was prime minister in 2002.

Now after enormous overspends, major delays, a global pandemic and hundreds of carriageway closures, drivers can travel direct between Swansea and Monmouthshire without passing through roadworks for the first time in 23 years.

The A465 crosses the south Wales coalfields, a national park and in some parts, twists close to people’s homes.

Almost 70 structures – including more than 40 new bridges and a dozen new junctions – have been built as part of the upgrade.

Workers have planted 285,000 trees to mitigate its significant environmental impact – offsetting more than seven million kilograms of CO2 a year – in a country which declared a climate emergency six years ago.

Creatures including bats, dormice and great crested newts have also been moved.

“In 50 years’ time, experts will look back and say the single biggest thing the Welsh government has done to raise the prospects of Heads of the Valleys communities is building this road,” Wales’ Transport Secretary Ken Skates previously said.

“This is about generating jobs, prosperity, opportunities and better connecting and benefiting communities across the region.”

The Heads of the Valleys upgrade had been split into six sections – done from the most to least dangerous for drivers.

The final stages cost £590m to physically build the road but because of the way the project is funded, it will cost £1.4bn – and the Welsh government has not yet paid a penny.

The final stretch between Dowlais Top in Merthyr Tydfil to Hirwaun in Rhondda Cynon Taf is being financed using something called the Mutual Investment Model (MIM) – which is a bit like getting a car on finance.

Instead of paying it off in one lump sum, the Welsh government will pay more than £40m a year for 30 years in return for an 11-mile stretch of road that will be maintained by a private firm until it is brought back into public ownership in 2055.

Plaid Cymru has called this way of funding a “waste of public money” and said private firms would “cream off” a “substantial amount of profit”.

The Welsh Conservatives have said the cost and delays “epitomises Labour’s 25 years of failure in Wales” and added the final “gargantuan” cost would have almost covered the scrapped M4 relief road around Newport – where there is about four times more daily traffic.

The Welsh government said without borrowing cash the way it has, it would not have been able to finish the final section.

That is because the UK left the European Union in the middle of the entire scheme, meaning access to money that had helped on previous sections was no longer available.

The entire cost of the whole 23-year, 28-mile scheme will be about £2bn when everything is included.

The Labour Welsh government said it had learned lessons from the project, changing construction contracts and reviewing indicators of contractor performance.

According to taxi driver Michael Gate from Aberdare, Rhondda Cynon Taf, it was a “nightmare” travelling between Aberdare and Merthyr Tydfil when the works were taking place.

“It was really dangerous because it was one lane over there and one lane back,” said the 63-year-old who has owned his taxi company since 2005.

He added: “Now it’s fantastic, it’s got to be the best road in Wales. It’s money well spent.”

Meanwhile, Claire Urch, 50, said the work had made journeys shorter but the constantly changing road lay-outs were “very difficult” for her daughter while learning to drive.

“I’ve seen cars driving thinking it’s a one-way street because they haven’t had any signposting there and it’s almost caused an accident on at least two occasions that I’ve been on there,” Ms Urch said, speaking about one diversion by Aberdare.

Nikki Webb, 49, lives in Hirwaun which she said had been “stuck right in the middle of it all”.

She said the work caused “chaos all the time” with lorries coming into the village but felt the “hassle was definitely worth it”.

Ms Webb added: “You can get to Merthyr so much quicker, I don’t find there’s traffic like there used to be.”

Mike Moore, who works as an operation manager for a traffic management company, said dualing the road “only made sense” from a safety point of view.

“It’s been five years of probably frustration for the public but in reality it pays dividends in the long run,” he said.

“These things have got to be built.”

It has come a long way from the start of this year when one affected man from Merthyr Tydfil described the Heads of the Valleys as “like the road from hell”.

He added: “Not even Chris Rea would dare come here.”

“As a whole, the Heads of the Valleys project is one of the UK’s biggest road upgrade projects for many years,” said Keith Jones of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

“And what’s been so challenging is keeping the existing road operational while the work has gone on in some challenging and bleak terrain.”

By Gareth Lewis, BBC Wales political editor

So Wales DOES build roads after all – albeit expensive ones that take a long time to complete.

The scheme to upgrade the Heads of the Valleys road predates a Welsh government decision to scrap all new major road projects on environmental grounds back in 2023.

But a change of transport secretary from Lee Waters to Ken Skates last year means similar schemes could now happen in the future, if they reflected the climate emergency and were at the forefront of design.

Welsh Labour has realised that some of its transport policies including the 20mph speed limit have been unpopular.

The economic potential for the road was not lost on one Labour MS who commissioned a report by a think tank into it back in 2021.

And with a Senedd election next year, expect Labour to signal the scheme’s completion for all they’re worth as it loops its way through many of the party’s traditional south Wales heartlands.