What really won Gloucestershire £71.5m for a new motorway junction
Beneath the veneer of the press release about Gloucestershire’s winning £71.5m to transform the M5 junction 10, key to success for the £1blln Golden Valley Project, there’s a hugely positive story.
Dear readers,
Welcome to Thursday’s standalone story.
What we try to outline below is what really won Gloucestershire the £71 million of funding it needs to complete a crucial upgrade to junction 10 of the M5, a project critical to our economic prosperity. And a project that until now has always felt just ever so out of reach.
Why spend so long talking to so many people when we could just have run the press release? Because one’s marketing and the other is journalism. It’s not about republishing press releases. It’s about looking beyond so you know what really took place.
This time, what lies beyond it is something we think speaks incredibly well of Gloucestershire, offers considerable hope and should be promoted, because this is a county that is at risk – at risk of being overlooked for funding, of being deconstructed by devolution, of being overlooked for investment and drowned out in the corridors of power by neighbours like Bristol.
And if it is to ever deliver a successful Golden Valley Development, described as ‘a once in a lifetime opportunity’, it will not do it by just building a motorway junction.
It needs to present itself as a county that can work together, that can unite, that will work hard to get what it needs, and only then – through the sheer weight of that collective might, and probably standing on tiptoes too, will it get the recognition.
Wouldn’t you want to be part of a place like that?
Congratulations to everyone involved. Which, by the sound of it, is just about everyone that matters!
Best regards,
Andrew Merrell (editor).
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What really won Gloucestershire that £71.5m for a new motorway junction
Beneath the glossy veneer of the press release about Gloucestershire’s winning £71.5m to transform the M5 junction 10, key to success for the £1blln Golden Valley Project, there’s a hugely positive story.
By Andrew Merrell.
A press release promoting the county council was widely recycled this week, promoting the news that the Government had granted it the £71.5 million needed to complete crucial remapping of a motorway junction.
It’s big news. The reshaping of junction 10 is regarded as critical to economic success, not least the much-hyped and still-pending Golden Valley Development, billed as a £1 billion housing and business park development beside GCHQ.
But ask a few questions and you quickly find out something very, very important has just taken place in Gloucestershire to make this happen – a county some think is becoming fragmented when only recently it seemed to stand as one.
Since the days of GFirst LEP, the once powerful business-run group that helped unite and champion Gloucestershire, making the junction accessible both ways has been recognised as a key economic catalyst.
But when the LEP was merged into the county council in April 2024 many felt business had lost its voice, major projects like the motorway junction, the Golden Valley, seemed to be stalling.
Privately, among the county’s business community at least, frustrations were mounting. Devolution appeared on the horizon, and the political bunfight that ensued didn’t fill anyone with any confidence either.
As for the motorway junction, it didn’t help that the estimated cost of £200m, when it was first mooted four years ago, had ballooned to £365m by the end of last year – forcing the county to go cap in hand to central government.
It seems that the very thing that made all these big projects seem possible was slipping away – that ability to put aside individual differences and present a united front. Until now.
Raikes spoke to key players involved in securing the money, political leaders, MPs, well-connected types, countywide, on and off the record, and what it turns out was a crucial element - the business people from across Gloucestershire who helped push this over the line.
We wanted to find out how they made it happen and how significant it really is.
I’m afraid we’ve paywalled this story to help pay for what we do - which is stories like this, delivering Gloucestershire some journalism, connecting the dots, creating community, celebrating the real heroes, and cutting through the marketing that flows fast through the social media channels and elsewhere.
