COMMENT
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THE ROAD TO RUIN
M y budget for the whole county
7,700km of roads—is £18m and there's an £83m repairs backlog." That plaintive cry from Lancashire County Council's chief engineer rather puts into perspective the current debate over whether or not building new roads guarantees new jobs. According to the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment, they don't. According to the Freight Transport Association, they do. So who should we believe? Perhaps the best thing is to stop thinking about new roads and start thinking about existing roads. Right now, as you read this, someone, somewhere is being delayed by roadworks on at least one section of Great Britain's 3,181km motorway network. So all this talk of new roads is an irrelevance. We can barely support the roads we have, and that remark from the LCC's chief engineer only goes to prove it. Last year the Institution of Civil Engineers estimated that the backlog of maintenance work had risen by 20% to a mind boggling £4bn, Road maintenance isn't the only thing successive Governments have Of you'll forgive the pun) let fall by the roadside. The bridge strengthening programme is also woefully behind schedule, so even if the current incumbents were to agree to a general weight increase to 44 tonnes in the long-awaited (and long overdue) White Paper, route restrictions would be the order of the day. But what's really galling is that we actually have the money to do something about 4. Every year we spend around £5.3bn on road improvements and maintenance, of which some £3.5-4bn is spent on maintenance alone. Every year the Treasury collects 223bn in fuel duty and VED—that's what CM would call a real budget deficit. Old or new roads create jobs. And you don't need a Government think-tank like SACTRA to tell you that.. just ask any tipper operator.