County councillor calls for more funding to fix Hertfordshire’s busiest roads
A Conservative county councillor has argued for higher levels of highways funding for Hertfordshire because its roads are so heavily used.
The authority is responsible for 3,100 miles (4,989km) of roads and receives more than £20m a year for their upkeep.
But that funding, it was explained to councillors, is allocated on the size and nature of the road network rather than on the number of road users.
At a meeting of the council’s overview and scrutiny committee on Tuesday (December 17), Cllr Richard Thake (Con, Knebworth & Codicote) suggested Hertfordshire County Council (HCC) was being underfunded.
He highlighted major roads through the county such as the A1 – for which the council is not responsible – and suggested that because the Great North Road was “inadequate”, motorists were effectively using the county’s roads as a bypass.
And that, he said, was pushing unnecessary traffic onto the county’s A and B roads, leading to greater wear and tear.
“My perception is that Hertfordshire is disproportionately heavily trafficked, being the approaches to London,” said Cllr Thake.
“And, frankly, a large part, in my view, of the problems we have got – in terms of maintaining an adequate highways base with the money we’ve got – is the fact that some of the principal distributor roads, such as the A1, are inadequate.
“So we are putting a lot of unnecessary traffic on the B roads and the roads that act, in essence, as a bypass to the A1.”
Cllr Thake was making the case at the meeting to Matt Eglinton, head of local highways policy and funding from the Department for Transport (DfT).
The DfT allocates capital funding for structural maintenance of the highways and the councillor asked how funding for individual authorities was calculated. He said it was his “profound belief” that Hertfordshire should be receiving more to deal with the problems it has in terms of traffic.
Mr Eglinton acknowledged that different local authorities would provide different evidence as to why they should receive more funding.
He set out a formula for the structural maintenance funding that took account of the relative size of the highways network in each authority area as well as factors such as bridges, other pieces of infrastructure and lighting columns.
Meanwhile, committee chairman Cllr David Andrews (Con, Ware North) also pointed to the impact on the county’s roads caused by issues on motorways.
“In many, many regards, we are a transit county,” he said. “Now, clearly, the motorways take a great proportion of that.
“When the M11 has a problem – which is probably weekly – there’s a variety of A and, in some cases, B roads that then become M11-lite. And the same thing happens with the A1 and the M1.
“We get disproportionate damage to our roads because of challenges on the main highways. And difficult as it might be, those are the sorts of things we would really, really welcome some considered reflection on, because we are having to make up that from elsewhere.”
The comments were made as part of a scrutiny of the ‘pressures on highways and customer concerns’.
At the meeting, it was reported that in addition to the 3,100 miles of road and 3,500 miles of footways, HCC is responsible for 180,000 gulleys, 92,000 road signs, 118,000 street lights and 680 sets of traffic lights.
Councillors were told the authority does not have the resources to do everything that customers would like, so the “high volume of high-quality work” was overshadowed by the defects not addressed.
Revenue funding for maintenance – including grass cutting, gulley cleaning and renewal of road markings – comes to the council through the Revenue Support Grant, paid by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.