Government figures suggest that local highway authority underspending of Whitehall grant for road repairs has come to an end, strengthening the case for increased funding.
New statistics show that English councils outside London overspent their combined revenue and capital allocations of £2.6bn in 2004/05 by 15% – or £473M, a reversal of the underspend in 2003/04 suggested by outturn figures. The Department for Transport’s own analysis confirmed that overspending of capital funding continued, and had increased from £272M to £283M, or 145% of the total provided.
The big surprise, however, was that revenue funds were spent in full, and topped up from councils’ own resources. The DfT had maintained that in each of the five years prior to 2003/04, an average of 16% of revenue allocations had haemorrhaged out of highways budgets and diverted elsewhere.
The figures were seen as a big boost for a campaign by LocalGov.co.uk sister title, Surveyor, which calls for a real-terms revenue funding increase in the Comprehensive Spending Review later this year.
Matthew Lugg, the County Surveyors’ Society engineering committee chair, said the figures ‘blow out of the water’ the DfT’s justification for not increasing revenue allocations. ‘Ministers can’t say now that they can’t convince the Treasury to increase funding because councils aren’t spending the money they’ve got’.
The revenue outturn figures did not include a calculation on the level of overspending, making it impossible to see by how much individual councils have over or underspent, comparing the total expenditure outturn of £2.3bn to the £2bn the chancellor announced gives a figure of £343M. Comparison with previous years, however, is complicated by new ‘formula spending share’ system for financing town halls. But closer examination reveals that this includes ‘highways maintenance planning, policy and strategy’ spending, an item excluded in previous years, when the DfT informed MPs that councils were underspending – by £440M on the revenue side in 2003/04, it claimed.
Removing this, however, still leaves a revenue overspend of £190M. The figures for 2005/06, which do not include this level of detail, suggest that councils again overspent last year, by £388M on the revenue side. Lugg said the statistics ‘suggest that we’re not getting enough money to do the job’. A spokesman for the DfT warned against comparing the revenue outturn figures with the chancellor’s stated figures, despite making the exact same comparison in previous years. The £2bn for 2004/05 might not have been exactly what was provided in the event, he said.
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