Road cash up by 16pc
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ROAD BUILDING spending is expected to rise by about 16 per cent next year, Transport Secretary David Howell announced this week.
The road building programme by central Government and local government rose from £1,300m this year to E1 ,530m in 1983/84.
But the sharp rise is not as good as it looks, because this year's figure is the expected upturn rather than the original budget. Spending on roads is lower than expected because of rapidly falling inflation.
The big increase is in local authority road building programmes which should jump to £800m from £600m. Mr Howell admitted that the local authorities were under-spending their road building allocation and he was taking action to try to deal with the problem.
Mr Howell said the good progress of 1981/82 had been continued this year, which had enabled motorway structural maintenance work to get a bigger slice of the road building budget. Spending on structural maintenance work was now being switched to the capital budget which would provide more flexibility.