County Surveyors give ICE challenge the cold shoulder

31 January 2007

The County Surveyors’ Society has warned the Institution of Civil Engineers against ‘maverick cries’ for extra funds for clearing Wales’ roads repair backlog.
Will Watson, chair of CSS (Wales), was ‘surprised the ICE Wales did not consult us before entering into this area’. While the CSS would ‘certainly support more funding for local roads, we recognise the budgetary pressures facing all tiers of Government,’ he said. The ICE challenged candidates for the May elections to the Welsh Assembly to back a £100M-a-year roads maintenance programme, pointing out that the extra £15M injected for 2007/08 would buy just 10km more maintenance (Surveyor, 25 January).
The CSS has, however, been co-operating with the assembly project to quantify the size of the local maintenance backlog in Wales and had, as a result, won acknowledgement that funding was inadequate. A Welsh Assembly Government spokesperson said the work, undertaken by consultant Halcrow, established that £140M was required to bring the entire local road network back into a satisfactory condition.
But Watson, director of technical services at Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council, said the CSS recognised that it was unrealistic to expect every road to be brought back into an ‘as new’ condition. ‘There will always be a number of roads requiring treatment at any one time. The discussion centres around what is an “acceptable backlog”.’ The extra £15M for the counties from April was ‘a good start’. The CSS also rejected the ICE’s call for a new national transport body to be created, should the four voluntary transport consortia of local authorities fail. Watson claimed that councils were ‘co-operating very well’. A new transport agency would not be well-placed to consider regeneration and other issues that were the responsibility of the counties.

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County Surveyors give ICE challenge the cold shoulder

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