Bournemouth hit by funding crisis

19 July 2007

Bournemouth Borough Council has warned that it is unable to prevent the deterioration of its highways under current funding arrangements.

An internal report revealed that £5.8M a year was required to maintain the network in its present condition, excluding any backlog maintenance costs. However, this year’s local transport settlement allocated to highways maintenance dropped from £900,000 to £580,000, and ‘there is unlikely to be any increase’.

In addition to a decline in its capital budget, the council was forced to reduce revenue spending due to ‘pressure to meet all demands on it’. As such, the council’s routine repairs pot was primarily targeted at category 1 defects, and its revenue structural maintenance budget had ‘effectively disappeared, leaving only enough to cover the cost of the surveys’.

The report also highlighted the inflation-busting rise in construction costs, due to aggregate tax, shortage of skilled labour, increasing bureaucracy, and rising standards. Major signalised junctions, for example, now required high-friction surfacing, which was expensive to maintain and only had a ‘limited life in heavily trafficked situations’.

As a result of the funding shortage, the council currently replaces less than 2% of its principal road network – against a recommended 4% – and just 0.4% of its non-classified road network – significantly below the recommended 2.5%. ‘Generally, at present, the roads in Bournemouth are in better condition than the national average, but, with the recent significant reduction in spending, the situation will start to deteriorate, probably slowly at first but it will accelerate,’ the report warns.

Tony Williams, the council’s executive director for environment and transport, told LocalGov.co.uk: ‘With highways, we need to plan years in advance, but we can’t do that with a finite investment budget. So it will be a major problem in about 15 years. ‘LTP funding hasn’t kept up with health or education capital, yet infrastructure is connected with these sectors. We face the dilemma of a constant budget against increasing demand.’

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