ACCORDING to the East Renfrewshire and South Lanarkshire councils, the proposed Glasgow Southern Orbital road will be an all-purpose dual carriageway starting at the M77 south of Malletsheugh and ending 9.3km later in open countryside at the A726 at Philipshill, writes Elizabeth Buie.

As a dual, two-lane, all-purpose road, argue the councils and the Scottish Office, it does not fall within the Government's current trunk roads review, due to be completed later this year - a review which has effectively acted as a moratorium on major road-building.

Friends of the Earth Scotland, which campaigns regularly against the air pollution caused by increased road traffic, however, is putting forward another scenario: that the Government, despite its much-vaunted environmental and integrated transport policies, is permitting the councils to build a trunk road by the back door.

It is a serious charge, especially given the timing. The White Paper on Integrated Transport is due to be published next month - it was expected sooner, but is rumoured to be the subject of inter-departmental disputes at Cabinet level. This paper will be the litmus test of the Government's environmental credentials when it comes to traffic reduction.

In the meantime, the proposed GSO road has been the subject of various objections and has been passed to the Scottish Office for consideration. The plan has received outline planning permission, but a Scottish Office spokesman said that even if the plans met Scottish Office approval, the proposal would still have to go through the formal planning process.

He added: ''This road is still some way off. In terms of time-scale, it will be as long as it takes to satisfy ourselves and anyone else.''

That may not be enough to satisfy anti-roads campaigners like Dr Richard Dixon, head of research for FoE Scotland. He is concerned that the GSO will prove a model for other councils caught up in the roads review but who are champing at the bit to build what they see as much-needed roads to serve local traffic.

Despite the Scottish Office's insistence that ''the GSO is not a trunk road - it has been promoted by the two councils, not by the Secretary of State'', it is admitted that the route would connect to the trunk road network and that the Scottish Office will therefore have some input.

The question also remains as to who will pay for the road. The Scottish Office has already agreed to give #2.5m under the Transport Challenge Fund, but as the road would be built under a 25-year Private Finance Initiative scheme using shadow tolls, additional funding costs would be shared not only by council tax-payers within East Renfrewshire and South Lanarkshire, but also by the rest of the Scottish tax-payers in years to come.

The Scottish Office spokesman said: ''The two councils will have to pay for the actual block of money for the capital deal, but we will be servicing the interest enacted through the debt.''

BY 1997 calculations, the road will cost #37m, with potential additional costs of #5m for the realignment of gas pipelines. Dr Dixon, however, argues: ''The GSO is, in all but name, a trunk road being built by two local authorities with design and construction being paid for by the Scottish Office. However, if the Scottish Office were building the GSO as a trunk road they would have to honour their commitment in the green paper Keep Scotland Moving to 'developing and assessing all future new major schemes in the context of an analysis . . . of the full range of alternative and complementary transport schemes'.''

He adds that the GSO has been examined as four different road-based options since 1947, including in 1992 when it was listed in the Government's Trunk Road Review as one of the schemes ''recommended for inclusion as priorities within any future roads programmes''.

As recently as 1995, the GSO was shown on an official map as ''proposed trunk road'' from the M8 to East Kilbride and as ''possible new trunk route'' from there to the M77.

The question is whether other councils will go down the same PFI avenue and build roads and by-passes linking existing motorways and trunk roads - the Hamilton Southern Orbital, for instance?

Dr Dixon sums up his argument thus: ''This is trunk road building by the back door. Some clever person at the Scottish Office has spotted that they can still build their favourite trunk roads, even when there is a moratorium on building trunk roads, by simply disguising them as local authority roads. Even worse, they can get away with ignoring the alternative options.''