A12 Dualling at Woodbridge: Comments Reopen to 24 September

Comments on the scheme to dual the A12 up to Woodbridge have been reopened until Thursday 24 September, and a piece of it has been dropped.

Suffolk County Council wrote to consultees on 24 August to say it had received “further information on drainage, highways, landscape, street lighting” and would take further comments. The letter, published on East Suffolk Council’s planning register as DC/26/3004/CCC, is the third round of consultation on an application first submitted in November 2025.

The consultation letter lists four subjects. A fifth change sits in the covering letter from the county’s own consultants and is not mentioned in the letter to consultees at all. WSP, writing for the council on 20 August, says: “As you are aware, the construction and operation of a Mobility Hub have been deleted from the Proposed Scheme.”

The mobility hub at Adastral Park was one of the four work packages the scheme was built around.

What the scheme is

Application SCC/0170/25SC is Suffolk County Council applying to Suffolk County Council. The county is both the applicant and the planning authority, under Regulation 3 of the Town and Country Planning General Regulations 1992, which requires it to keep the people promoting the scheme separate from the people deciding it.

The planning statement describes highway improvements to 11km, or 6.8 miles, of the A12 from the A14 at Seven Hills to the Woods Lane junction north of Woodbridge. It includes:

• upgrading the single carriageway to full dual carriageway between the A12 and B1438 Ipswich Road junction and the A12 and B1079 Grundisburgh Road junction
• a new bridge for pedestrians and cyclists to replace the existing Martlesham footbridge
• a new signalised bus link junction on the A12 north of Anson Road, connecting the A12 and Main Road via Portal Avenue
• a new shared foot and cycleway between Seckford Hall Road and Grundisburgh Road, and new crossings at Main Road, Grundisburgh Road and Anson Road
• an attenuation pond, swales, rainwater gardens and tanks for drainage
• hard and soft landscaping, utility diversions and a new layby

Construction “is planned to take 24 months from commencement”. The assessment puts the scheme’s own peak at about 166 lorries and 33 vans a day in the busiest month. Taken together with Sizewell C, it expects the official HGV route to build “to a peak of 700 HGV movements (350 HGVs each way) at the busiest time”, confined to the A12 and A14 rather than local roads.

The council received the application on 17 November 2025 and validated it on 16 December. Nine months later it is still listed as “Application Pending a Decision”.

The two registers give different deadlines, so use the county’s. East Suffolk’s consultation copy carries an expiry date of 11 September and a determination deadline of 15 September. The county’s own register, and the letter it sent out, both say 24 September.

Woodbridge Town Council objects, and says it has been ignored

Woodbridge Town Council supports dualling the A12 and objects to this application. It set out ten numbered concerns in February and none of them, it says, has been addressed.

Its second response, dated 19 June, is blunt: “we are disappointed that none of our concerns have been considered and therefore affirm our objection to the planning application. We have no comment to make on the additional documents provided.” It asks the county to explain why.

The ten issues include:

• the scheme stopping at Woods Lane, which it calls “a missed opportunity not to continue dualling up to the Wickham Market bypass”
• access to and from Prentices Lane
• the Grundisburgh Road crossing sitting too close to the roundabout, where “visibility lengths are poor for both vehicles and pedestrians”
• no 30mph limit at the crossings, including the crossing north of Hasketon Road used to reach Farlingaye School
• the Haugh Lane crossing of the A12 needing an upgrade
• traffic modelling that leaves out school leaving times, “when large volumes of traffic utilise the roundabout and severe queues develop”
• errors in the applicant’s own bus stop mapping, which the town council says shows stops that do not exist on Manor Road, Bullards Lane, Newnham Avenue and Peterhouse Crescent, and misses others
• no plan for keeping diverted traffic off Angel Lane, Chapel Street and Bredfield Street during the works
• queues at Seven Hills backing onto the A14 dual carriageway even after the works
• doubt that the Portal Avenue bus junction is worth its cost and delay

In its June letter the council adds a specific ask: a 30mph zone between the Woods Lane roundabout and the proposed crossing south of the Grundisburgh Road roundabout. Without it, it says, “it cannot be considered safe to encourage the public to cross the road at the locations specified”.

Melton says the bottleneck just moves north

Melton Parish Council takes the opposite view of the same problem. Its clerk wrote on 25 June that members “broadly welcome these upgrades, especially the improved facilities for cyclists and pedestrians”, but are “very disappointed that the work stops at the Woods Land roundabout”.

North of Woods Lane the A12 is single carriageway as far as Ufford, and includes what the parish council calls “the notorious Bredfield junction, where many accidents have been recorded”. If the dualling ends where it does, it says, “the ‘bottleneck’ that is presently at the Woodbridge bypass, will only shift north”, “potentially leading to more vehicles using Melton and Ufford as shortcuts”.

77 objections, one letter of support

The county register carries 101 published representations, most of them from residents and a handful from bodies including Kesgrave Town Council, the Seckford Foundation and Bloor Homes. Counted by how the council itself titles each one, 77 are objections, 23 are comments and one is support.

They arrive in waves that track the consultations: 55 in January, one in February, two in May, 22 in June, 15 in July and six in August.

The scheme fails its own biodiversity test

The applicant’s planning statement is candid about one thing the consultation letters do not mention. On habitats, the scheme as submitted does not meet the 10% biodiversity net gain that planning law requires.

The site holds 27.25 hectares of habitat and 0.54km of native hedgerow before work starts. After it, the assessment records “an anticipated net loss -32.44% BNG, failing to meet the on-site BNG objective”, and says all three habitat trading rules are breached: high, medium and low distinctiveness. The largest losses are scrub, urban trees and lowland mixed deciduous woodland.

To reach a 10% gain the scheme needs 36.79 area habitat units against the 28.11 it loses. The statement says the applicant “is committed to meeting the BNG objective” and could get there by keeping more habitat on site or buying credits off site.

Hedgerows do better. The scheme would keep 0.13km and plant 1.47km, an 11.64% net gain, and meets the trading rules for linear habitats.

The August amendments make some of the tree position worse rather than better. WSP’s letter records that an updated arboricultural assessment now shows “existing trees around the junction with Portal Avenue previously shown as ‘retained’ now shown as ‘removed’ or ‘at risk’”, and that trees south of the Martlesham footbridge ramp previously marked for retention will now go.

The scheme’s land-take table covers 5.11 hectares across five locations. Two of those are farmland: 1.85 hectares at the northern dualling section near Seckford, which desk information puts at grade 3a, and 0.4 hectares at Seven Hills, surveyed as 3a or 3b. Grade 3a is what the statement calls “good quality agricultural land best and most versatile”; 3b is moderate quality.

What it means for you

If you want to comment, the deadline is Thursday 24 September, and it is a genuine one: this is the round in which the mobility hub disappeared from the scheme.

• Comment to the county, not the district. The application is SCC/0170/25SC on the Suffolk County Council planning register. East Suffolk’s DC/26/3004/CCC record is only the consultation copy.
• The register will not take anonymous comments. It says names and addresses of people commenting appear on the website, and that comments without a name and address “will not be taken into account”.
• The case officer is named. Andy Rutter, development manager for growth, highways and infrastructure, on 01473 263766.
• Representations are deleted after the decision. The register states that once an application is determined “all representations will be removed from the website”, so anything you want to keep, keep a copy of.

We will report the decision when it is made. Current closures on the A12 north of the town are on our roadworks and travel page, and the wider planning picture is on East Suffolk planning news.