£6bn boost for highways funding unveiled

16 July 2008

A glut of highways funding, including £6bn for hard-shoulder running and motorway widening schemes, more TIF money, and increased asset management cash, was announced on Wednesday.

Transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, also announced the first tranche of performance-based funding from the £60M Urban Congestion Performance Fund (Surveyor, 31 May 2007), with £6M to be shared among the UK’s eight biggest city areas over the next two years.

London took the biggest chunk, receiving £2.1M between now and the end of the next financial year. Outside the capital, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands were best off, with each due to get more than £800,000.

Leeds will become the latest area to benefit from pump-prime TIF funding, receiving £2.3M to further its bid.

The council said the money would be spent on studying the different options available to beat congestion, including improved public transport and demand-management solutions, such as road pricing.

The £6bn will fund a mix of techniques to reduce congestion on motorways and trunk roads, such as hard shoulder running, as well as taking forward advanced motorway signalling and the traffic management-feasibility study, which has already identified almost 800 lane kilometres of motorway with the potential for hard shoulder use (Surveyor, 6 March 2008).

The package includes funding for widening the M25 between junctions 16 and 23 and between 27 and 30. Kelly also revised cost estimates for major Highway Agency projects in light of the Nichols review.

Many of these, the Department for Transport admitted, were ‘significantly higher’ than previous estimates, which it put down to road construction inflation. An extra £8M for local authorities to help them with their asset management plans was also announced, increasing the pot from £15M to £23M.

Welcoming the announcement, Matthew Lugg, chair of the UK Roads Board, said: ‘This is all good news. Good for roads and good for the economy, these are some big numbers.’

On the extra asset management cash, Lugg said it reinforced the message that the Government was taking the issue seriously, and urged authorities to decide how they might spend the cash as ‘the money will be coming sooner than expected’.

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£6bn boost for highways funding unveiled

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