Cumbria’s roads are set to be hit by a £40million reduction in Government funding over the next four years, the leader of the county council claims.
Stewart Young says that the reduction in financial support from Whitehall will deal a blow to highways operations.
He said: “On next year’s budget allocations, as everyone’s aware, the Government cut out capital grant for highways by £10million this year which we had understood would be a one-off, unfortunately we’ve had confirmation last week that far from being a one off it will be continued next year and for the following two years so we’ve not only lost £10million investment this year in our highway network, but we’ll lose another £10million for each of the next three years. So it’s £40million in total.”
Councillor Young said that it was a similar picture in regions across the country and Labour and Conservative-led councils alike were incensed but the leader said “it looks like its fallen on deaf ears”.
The county council has already set its budget for the 2022/23 financial year.
“I know we agreed at council to put £1.2million extra into the highways revenue budget but you’ll see that will make very little impact compared to a loss of that scale in investment.
“The public, they see the potholes in the road, they see that roads aren’t getting repaired as they were but they need to understand if we lose that amount of money, there’s only one possible consequence which is that the highways network will deteriorate.”
Member of the Conservative opposition Mike Mitchelson said that more could be done locally to address potholes.
He said: “From the public’s point of view, if the public picked a report up and it said ‘the highways budget will involve a £20,000 underspend’, the public’s going to say ‘why can’t we have the potholes fixed?’ we shouldn’t be doing an underspend when we’ve got major requests for potholes.”
But the local committee also heard that the underspend will be carried forward to next year.
