The Department for Transport (DfT) has been accused of ‘wilfully misleading’ councils following its response to the regional funding advice (RFA).
The claim has come from the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT), which said money had been promised for road schemes that the Government knew could not be afforded following the inevitable budget cuts.
In letters to England’s nine regions, the DfT said that, due to financial uncertainty, the go ahead for the 10-year plans would remain provisional.
However, it instructed the regions to work on the basis of the programme in the short term.
Alison Quant, president of the CSS (County Surveyors’ Society), warned that local road maintenance works could suffer if councils focused on committed schemes.
‘At this stage, councils are likely to put additional effort into securing project starts to achieve committed schemes ahead of the “guillotine”,’ she told LocalGov.co.uk sister title Surveyor.
‘This could put bigger schemes, with longer planning and design profiles, and allocations to local transport funding, which includes structural maintenance of local roads, at a disadvantage beyond the early years of the programme.’
But a DfT spokesman said: ‘The current round of the RFA has seen an increase in the number of major maintenance schemes being prioritised by regions, which should increase local road maintenance funding.’
Mrs Quant added that the DfT’s broad support for programmes could alternatively be read as a ‘lack of robust approach’, due to the likelihood that the schemes would not survive post-election budget cuts.
Richard George, the CBT’s roads and climate campaigner, said he believed the DfT was ‘leading councils down the garden path’, and its approach would result in a waste of time and money.
‘The DfT has rubber-stamped priorities that it knows cannot be afforded. It feels like it is using the good grounds of low carbon and value for money as an excuse to scrap projects,’ he added.
The DfT spokesman said: ‘We have always been clear that spending plans for departments are set out in spending reviews. Until we have a spending review, we are not in a position to project funding out with any certainty, beyond the current spending review period.’
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