Senior county officials have expressed alarm at the Government’s plan for regional bodies to revisit the capital funding allocated for local transport plans.

The County Surveyors’ Society (CSS) said expanding the scope of the regional funding allocation process to include the integrated transport and maintenance blocks of funding, as well as council’s major schemes, ‘comes as a surprise’.

The Department for Transport had produced a formula for distributing LTP funds in a way which was broadly based on both the need for transport investment and the past performance of authorities.

Brian Smith, the president of the CSS, told Surveyor: ‘The suggestion that a region might change the distribution between local authorities in that region seems strange, given the work of recent years to produce the formula for distributing funds.’

He was concerned that the move ‘could simply lead to a transfer of spending away from local authority maintenance and integrated transport in total’.

Hikes in the cost of 11 Highways Agency regional trunk road improvements under development of 47%-96% could take the total rom £945M that was approved by the regions to as much as £1.9bn (Surveyor, 24 July).

The South East Regional Assembly (SEERA) said that if there were any further cost rises for the region’s four HA schemes, it would ‘consider the implications for the rest of the regional programme’ – potentially putting the squeeze on local authority major schemes.

The DfT is assuming that the funding allocations for integrated transport and maintenance will only increase in line with inflation each year from 2010/11 onwards, or by 2% a year.

It said the idea was to provide regions with the opportunity to consider how available funds for transport could best support their development strategies. The funding allocations could be used ‘for any purpose’, including ‘buying’ enhancements on the HA strategic network and the rail network not otherwise proposed for delivery, according to the DfT advice, published during the parliamentary recess.

A SEERA spokeswoman said the changes offered ‘the opportunity to ensure that all local transport projects fit in with economic development plans’. Any amendments to the distribution of funding between local authorities would have to be agreed through consensus, she stressed, highlighting that 70% of assembly members were local authority representatives.

But Smith said: ‘The bottom line is that the balance between maintenance and integrated transport, and how those funding pots are spent should be a local decision, and I expect practitioners and councillors to be making this point strongly in coming months.’