The start of work on the long-awaited £56 million Newtown bypass has been greeted with a collective sigh of relief. It’s a massively significant project not only for Newtown but the whole of Mid Wales, particularly the Upper Severn Valley.

To say that Newtown has become a traffic bottleneck would be the understatement of all time. At peak times during the tourist season, drivers can be sat in a four mile queue to the east of Newtown for an hour or more.

The bypass presents a huge opportunity for the rebirth of the town, which I believe must be taken if Newtown is to move forward. I have lived and worked in and around Newtown all my life and had the privilege of reporting on all matters relating to the town for nearly a quarter of a century while working for and editing the County Times & Express. It’s my home town and I feel passionate about its future.

Newtown is literally at a crossroads. In a physical sense, the A483 and A489 roads meet in the town. These roads are prime routes for traffic travelling from the West Midlands to Mid Wales and from north to south within Wales.

One of main reasons that the town has become a bottleneck is a series of five sets of traffic lights within a quarter of a mile. The Welsh Government says the lights are synchronised. They probably are, but not with each other!

On busy Bank Holidays, when tourists are heading for the Cambrian Coast, traffic can tail back to the east of Newtown as far as Abermule. For anyone visiting Mid Wales for the first time, what a welcome! It hardly encourages a return visit.

That’s why local MP Glyn Davies and Assembly Member Russell George maintain that the bypass is fantastic news for the Mid Wales tourism industry. The journey from the West Midlands to their Mid Wales destination will, in the future, be much smoother for tourists.

But it’s not only tourists that stand to benefit. Local businesses that rely on deliveries will be able to plan their work schedules with more certainty without having to arrange transport in the early morning or evening. For local people also, it ought to be much easier to get around the town.

Of course, a bypass does exactly what the name suggests: it takes traffic around the congested town centre. There is obviously a danger that motorists travelling along the new road will be encouraged to keep going and not stop to sample the delights of Newtown. Having said that, I suspect few drivers are currently keen to stop in the town having been held up in a traffic jam.

Local businesses are calling for adequate signage on the bypass to persuade motorists to break their journey. I’m not alone in thinking it needs much more than that. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to put Newtown on the map by highlighting everything the town has to offer as a destination in its own right.

The town is the birth place of famous social reformer Robert Owen and mail order inventor Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, an entrepreneur whose customers included Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale. A market town since the end of the 13th century, Newtown has its roots in the woollen industry and became an international hub for flannel. That leads on to the meteoric rise of the Laura Ashley fashion empire which still has a strong presence in the town. Shouldn’t we be making more of this fascinating history to promote the town as a tourist destination?

Newtown is still the largest town in the vast rural county of Powys, with a population of around 11,000. It was once a hub of economic activity as the regional centre for Mid Wales. However, in recent years, that regional centre status has been snatched away by Aberystwyth and there is a palpable feeling that life is being sucked out of the town. Welshpool, the next town along the River Severn, is now attracting more retail developments than Newtown, which again is a sign of the worrying times.

Over the years, Newtown has spurned opportunities to revitalise its retail heart, which is ironic considering its entrepreneurship history. How much busier would the town centre be today, had the Tesco and Morrisons stores not been allowed to locate out of town, on Pool Road? Tone centre sites at Newtown Bowling Club and Town Hall Grounds were considered but fell through.

Newtown desperately needs a shot in arm, as the traffic jams have driven away shoppers and it will not be easy to encourage them to return. Strategic action is needed and the start of work on the bypass is the perfect time to form a task force of the brightest minds and most innovative thinkers to come up with a plan to reinvigorate Newtown.

We don’t need another talking shop, we need people with fire in their belly to make things happen. The town needs concerted action by all the major players involved. The Welsh Government is forking out £56 million for the bypass and this project must be the catalyst for major change in the Mid Wales economy.

Newtown is at the gateway to Mid Wales and is of strategic importance. A report, ‘The Severn Valley: The Innovative and Enterprising Heart of Mid Wales’, which was produced by three local businessmen, including one of my PR colleagues, Owain Betts, makes very interesting reading. It was presented to the Welsh Government and Powys County Council last year and seeks support for a dynamic, joined up approach to regenerating communities in the Severn Valley in Mid Wales.

The report calls for concerted action, using the bypass as a springboard. The proposals seek to energise communities from within to: enable economic investment; attract inward investment; support business growth; social and community cohesion; and develop planning policies for enhanced business and social inclusion. I am informed that the report was well received but, as tends to happen in Mid Wales, nothing has yet happened and it’s gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. The clock is ticking and in two years’ time the bypass will be completed. But will we have a regeneration strategy to go with it?

In 2018, if nothing has been achieved to put Newtown firmly on the map as a tourist destination and attractive location for inward investment, then we will all have failed not just our generation but our children and grandchildren.

With every major road project, there are always winners and losers. I have already mentioned who I think the winners will be. However, spare a thought for the losers: the people who are losing their homes, businesses and land to make way for the bypass. I helped a couple with publicity and political lobbying to try to redirect the bypass around their property, but the alternative route proved too expensive and they have had to sell up and move out.

I have also worked with landowners alongside the Newbridge-on-Wye and Cwmbach bypass, near Builth Wells, some of whom are still awaiting compensation payments from the Welsh Government 10 years after this road scheme was built. A worrying pattern has emerged of alleged broken promises by the Welsh Government and its agents in their dealings with landowners. It would be interesting to discover if this pattern has been repeated on other major road projects across Wales.

Losing one’s home, business or land is upsetting, even when compensation is paid. The least the owners can expect is transparency and integrity. I hope I’m wrong, but if my fears for land and property owners caught up in the Newtown bypass prove well founded, then Glyn Davies and Russell George – assuming that he is re-elected in May – can expect a busy workload in the years ahead!