As chairman of the Conservative Rural Affairs Group, I was delighted, not to say thrilled, to read that the Government is toying with the idea of an extension to Crossrail. With the main project still four years from completion, politicians are already talking about extending it northwestwards from the capital to Hertfordshire. I can only applaud the fact that this will mean passengers joining the service at, say, Watford Junction will be able to whizz through to Canary Wharf without the irritating necessity of a change at Euston in a mere 43 minutes, a reduction of 12 minutes. How much this will add to the cost of the £16bn scheme is not yet clear. But it won't come cheap. Such things never do. And the outcome inevitably will be to add a further degree of weighting to the average spend on infrastructure in the London area – and to make those of us living in the South West appear more than ever like the poor relations living in a forgotten backwater. In London, spending on infrastructure per head of population is a whopping £2,731. In the Home Counties it's just £792. And in the South West? Well prepare yourself for a shock. In the South West each of us merits an average spend of... £19. No noughts have been omitted. I accept that London, as one of the world's major cities, contains a lot of people who make a lot of daily journeys. Travel is a major element of the city's life. But it is unfair that the further west one travels the less money is being spent to improve the transport infrastructure. This fact will not have been lost on the thousands of bank holiday motorists who found themselves admiring the scenery in some detail as they crawled westwards along the section of the A303 between Amesbury and Mere that has yet to be turned into a dual carriageway some 40 years after the rest of the road was upgraded. And as they performed the journey in reverse a couple of days later. Neither will it have gone unobserved as they inched their way across the Blackdowns on the single-carriageway A30, another stretch about which politicians have debated endlessly and commissioned any number of reports and consultations – but done absolutely nothing, despite the fact that a completely upgraded A303/A30 route could do much to relieve pressure on the M4/M5 where the Friday afternoon traffic gridlock around Bristol is now passing into legend. South West road improvements have virtually ground to a halt. There is one major scheme, the Kingskerswell by-pass, due to open in 2015. It will have the effect (such have traffic levels increased since it was conceived) of pushing a bottleneck a few miles south. But elsewhere you will look in vain for any activity. There are, of course, lists of works waiting to be done. Some schemes have been on the books for decades. But there is no sign of any work starting any time soon. One of the unrecognised results of our inferior road network is the accident toll, contributed to by drivers who for most of the year cruise comfortably around the rest of the country on broad, modern roads, but who simply cannot cope with the conditions on many of our unimproved routes. I am not talking about Cornwall, where roads have had millions of pounds spent on them over the past two or three decades, along with the millions more of taxpayers' cash that has been squandered on pie-in- the-sky schemes designed to transform the county's economy by creating jobs, but which have crashed in a welter of debts and redundancies. No, Cornwall has had much more than its fair share – although I note the locals are still complaining. My beef is about the rest of the South West: Devon, Dorset and Somerset, which politicians seem content to leave in some quaint timewarp while they get on with planning Son of HS2 across the Pennines; and which they seem happy to leave at the mercy of dangerously substandard roads, one of the most inefficient, chaotically run and complained-about bus and train operators this country has ever known, and with a single east-west rail route that can be put out of action for weeks on end by bad weather. I did expect something better from this government than its resorting to the old Labour trick of taking advantage of the public's short-term memory by announcing the same spending plans several times... but never actually spending the money. But that is what we have seen. I would remind MPs that the election is a mere nine months away and that when the voters shuffle into the polling booths next May the question uppermost in their minds will be: 'What has the Government done for us?' On the issue of transport, of facilitating simpler, quicker and less-expensive means to get around the region, the answer will be a loud and unanimous: 'Nothing.'