£1bn needed ‘to clear backlog’

24 January 2007

Candidates for the May elections to the Welsh Assembly have been challenged to back a £100M-a-year programme to clear counties’ roads repair backlog and new, independent regional transport consortia.
The Institution of Civil Engineers Wales issued a policy paper with the aim of improving transport, waste and other infrastructure an election issue. Deteriorating county roads, the lack of a single facility for hazardous waste, and a ‘worsening’ shortage of technical professionals are among the pressing issues.
The ICE Wales renewed its call for a £1bn programme to clear the roads maintenance backlog. ICE manager for Wales, Denys Morgan, claimed the extra £15M injected for 2007/08, while welcome, ‘falls far short of what’s required’, buying just 10km of extra maintenance.
Levering in private finance was ‘essential’ to meeting the £1bn requirement – a call which is likely to prove unpalatable in left-leaning Wales than across the border.
The call for strengthening of the voluntary regional transport consortia comes to both improve delivery and tackle Wales’ skills shortage. Strengthened consortia – similar to those established in Scotland – would improve the ability of Wales to recruit and retain technical staff.
‘Unless we pool our expertise regionally, local authorities will, in future, have a great deal of trouble in servicing their transport networks,’ said Morgan.
The voluntary consortia had mixed records, according to the ICE. ‘The best is proceeding extremely well, but elsewhere, delivery is slower,’ he said, declining to mention names. A new national transport agency should be created to step in, should they fail. The report also urges a national call for every town and city to bring forward sites for multi-modal transport interchanges.
Population centres as big as Swansea and Newport and as significant in their counties as Wrexham and Carmarthen currently had train and bus stations some distance apart – as much as one mile in some cases.
The report also champions the bringing forward of a site for hazardous waste disposal, emphasising the cost to Welsh businesses for transporting this waste to sites in England, and presses for assembly financing of energy-from-waste demonstration projects.

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£1bn needed ‘to clear backlog’

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