Ken slammed over roads budget

23 January 2007

Ken Livingstone’s £160M funding for boroughs’ local highway schemes for the coming financial year has come under fire.
The mayor of London said the award was part of a ‘record-breaking five-year £792M programme for local transport schemes’, and that transport funding for boroughs had almost doubled since he was elected in the year 2000. ‘Boroughs across London, both inner and outer, are benefiting from this funding, which is providing real improvements to local travel,’ he said.
But 11 of the 33 boroughs received less funding than last year and only four attracted a significant increase of £1M or more. In three of the four boroughs which won big increases, all or most of the extra funding was for major bridge repairs.
Some £1.5M of Sutton’s £1.7M hike was to strengthen an A237 bridge at Hackbridge; £1.2M of Croydon’s £1.6M extra was for rebuilding another ageing A237 bridge, at Coulsdon; and half of Southwark’s £1.5M was for reconstruction of an A2214 bridge at north Dulwich.
Cycling received a huge hike for the second year running, rising to £20.3M compared with £15M last year, and £8.5M in 2004/05. Funding for road safety nudged up again to almost £30M, while the money for bus improvements – priority measures and bus accessibility – stayed steady at £24.7M.
The budget for principal roads maintenance, however, was reduced for the third year in a row, and at £25M, is 38% down on 2004/05 level.
TfL told Surveyor last year that it expected ‘the gradual diminution’ of principal road spending as boroughs cleared the maintenance backlog (Surveyor, 15 December 2005). Bridge strengthening also got less, at £7.1M compared with last year’s £12M. Richmond council gained the biggest slice of the £160M of £6.9M, which followed a similarly big chunk last year, of £5.5M. Trevor Pugh, Richmond’s director of environmental services, said this was down to fostering a close relationship with TfL, and closely following its bidding guidance.
A £1.6M scheme for Richmond town centre, for example, combined streetscape improvements, bus-priority measures, and maintenance. ‘We’ve found that placing maintenance in wider schemes helps win funding for it,’ he said. Kensington & Chelsea received the smallest award for the second year running. Cllr Daniel Moylan expressed dismay that its highways activities continued to be so ‘poorly funded’.

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